Worlds In Collision,

Immanuel Velikovsky maintains that the planets have revolved in their current orbits for only a few thousand years. We maintain also that one planet. Venus was formerly a comet and that it joined the family of planets within the memory of mankind, thus offering an explanation of how one of the planets originated. We conjectured that the comet venus originated in the planet Jupiter; then we found that smaller comets were born in contacts between Venus and Mars. Thus offering an explanation of the principle of the origin of the comets of the solar system. That these comets are only a few thousand years old explains why, despite dissipation of the material of their tails in space, they have not yet disintegrated, entirely. From the fact that Venus was once a comet we leaned that comets are not nearly immaterial bodies as was thought.

We claim that the earth's orbit changed more than once and with it the length or the year; that the geographical position of the terrestrial axis and its astronomical direction changed repeatedly and that at a recent date the polar star was in the constellation of the Great Bear. The length of the day altered. the polar regions shifted.

We arrived at the conclusion that electrical discharges took place between Venus, Mars and the earth when , in very close contacts, their atmospheres touched each other; that the magnetic poles of eh earth become reversed only a few thousand years ago; and that with the change in the mon's orbit; the length of the month changed. too. and repeatedly so. In the period of seven hundred years between the middle of eh second millennium before the present era and the eighth century the years consisted of 360 days and the month of almost exactly thirty days, but earlier the day, month, and year were of different lengths.
Excessive evaporation of water from the surface f the oceans and seas, a phenomenon that was postulated to explain excessive precipitation and formation of ice covers, was caused by extraterrestrial agents. Though in such occurrences we see the origin of the Fimbul winter, we are inclined to regard the erratic boulders and tell, or gravel, clay and sand on the substratum of rock as having been carried, not by ice, but by onrushing gigantic tides caused by change in the rotation of the terrestrial globe; thus have we accounted for moraines that migrated form the equator toward higher latitudes and altitudes. from the equator across Africa  toward the South Pole.
We recognized that the religions of eh peoples of the world have a common astral origin. The narrative of the Hebrew bible concerning the plagues and other wonders of the time of the exodus is historically true and the prodigies recorded have a natural explanation. We learned that there was a world conflagration and that naphtha poured form the sky; that only a small proportion of people an animals survived; that the passage of the sea and the theophany at Mount Sinai are not inventions; that the shadow of death or twilight of the gods. (Gotterdammerung) refers to the time of the wandering in the desert; that manna or ambrosia really fell from the sky, from the clouds of Venus;
We found also that Joshua's miracle with the sun and the moon is not all that of the credulous. We learned why there are common ideas in the folklore of peoples separated by oceans, and we recognized the importance of world upheavals in the content of legends. and why  the planets were deified and which planet was represented.by Pallas Athene, and what is the celestial plot of the Iliad and in what period this epic was created, and why the Roman people make Mars their national god and progenitor of the founders of Rome,We came to understand the real meaning of the messages of the Hebrew prophets Amos, Isaiah, Joel, Micah, and others. We were able also to ascertain the year and month and day of the last cosmic catastrophe and to establish the nature of the agent that destroyed the Sennacherib's army. Wanderings of people in the fifteenth and eighth centuries. We learned the origin of the belief in the closeness of the Jewish people;' we traced the original meaning of eh archangel.s and the source of eschatological beliefs in doomsday.
If it is true that cosmic catastrophes occurred such a short time ago how about the more remote past?  What can we find out concerning the Deluge, at present thought to have been al local flooding of the Euphrates that impressed the Bedouins coming form the desert? In general what can be brought to light concerning the world's more distant past and earlier celestial battles ?
Such a synchronization of the histories of eh ancient world is attempted in Ages in Chaos. Its starting point is the simultaneity of physical catastrophes in the countries of eh ancient East and the comparison of records referring to such a catastrophes among the people of antiquity. For the rest, I have preceded by collating political records and archeological material of the ancient East covering a period of over a thousand years from the end of the Middle Kingdom in Egypt to the time of Alexander of Macedonia; going step by step from century to century, the research arrives at an entirely revised sequence of events in ancient history and discloses a discrepancy of a number of centuries in the conventual chronology.
IN the geological and palentoliogical material .. psychology Investigation should be make into why and how the Jewish people, who had the same experiences as other peoples and who started with an astral religion like the rest of the nations, early cast off astral deities and forbade the worship of images. The scriptures invite a new approach to Bible criticism., one that will make it possible to see the process of transition from an astral religion to monotheism with its idea of a single creator, not a star, not an animal, and not a human being.

Problem of collective amnesia. GA Atwater suggests a search of the vestiges of terrifying experiences of the past in the present behavior of man.
What can we establish concerning the disappearance of species and even of genera, the theory of evolution versus the theory of catastrophic mutations, and the development of animal and plant life in general of the time when giants lived or when Brontosaur populate the earth. With submersion of and emersion of land. the origin of the salt in the sea, the origin of deserts. the physical effects of retardation of reversal of the earth in its diurnal rotation are differently evaluated by various scientists. Some express the opinions that a total destruction of the earth and volatilization if its entire mass would fallow such slowing down or stasis. the concede, however, that destruction of such dimensions should not occur if the earth continued to rotate and only its axis were tilted out of its position. This could by caused by the earth's passing trough a strong magnetic field at an angle to the earth's magnetic axis. A rotating steel top, when tilted by a magnet, continues to rotate. Theoretically, the terrestrial axis could by tilted for a certain length of time, and at any angle, at such a fashion that it would lie in the plane of the ecliptic. In the case, of the other two hemispheres the northern or the southern would remain in prolonged day, the other, in prolonged night.The tilting of the axis could produce the visual effect of a retrogressing or arrested sun; a greater tilting ; a multiple day or night; and in the case of still greater tilting a reversal of poles with east and west exchanging places; all this though out a substantial disruption i the mechanical momentum of the rotation or revolution of the earth.
Some claim all parts of the earth rotate with the same angular velocity, an if the theoretical stoppage or slowing down did not upset the equality of the angular velocity of the various parts of the solid glove, the earth would survive the slowing down or stasis, or even a reversal of rotation. However, the fluid parts the air and the water of the oceans, would certainly have their angular velocity disrupted and hurricanes and tidal waves would sweep the earth Civilizations would by destroyed ,but not the globe.
Limitations which a single scholar must be aware of on facing such an ambitious program of inquiry into the architectonics of the world and its history, In earlier centuries philosophers not infrequently attempted a synthesis of knowledge in its various branches. Today, with knowledge becoming more and more specialized, whoever tries to cope with such a task should ask in all humility the question put at the beginning of this volume which part of this work is committed to us?
Contacts between celestial bodies are not limited to the domain of the solar system. From time to time a nova is seen in the sky, a blazing fixed star.which until then had been small or invisible.
when physicists came upon the idea that the atom is built like a solar system, the atoms of various chemical elements differing in the mass of their suns(nuclei) and the number of their planets (electrons) the notion was looked upon with much favor. But it was stressed that an atom differs from the solar system by the fact that it is not gravitation that makes the electrons go round the nucleus, but electricity
Besides this another difference was found; an electron in an atom, on absorbing the energy of a photon (light) jumps to another orbit and again to another when it emits light and releases the energy of a photon. Because of this phenomenon, comparison with the solar system no longer seemed valid. The solar system is actually built like an atom; only in keeping with the smallness of the atom, the jumping of electrons from one orbit to another; when hit by the energy of a photon, takes places many times a second, whereas in accord with the vastness of the solar system, a similar phenomenon occurs there once in hundreds or thousand so of years. In the middle of the second millennium before the present era, the terrestrial globe experienced two displacements, the in the eighth or seventh century before the present era, it experienced three or four more. In the period between Mars and Venus, and the moon also shifted.
All these questions carry over from one field of scientific enquiry to another. It can be seen here that problems in one area carry over into other scientific areas, thought to have no contact with each other.

Back to Index

Back to bookviews

more on Velikov

Worlds in Collision is available at Amazon.com and other publishers

Worlds in collision more