Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky [Hardcover]

Charles Ginenthal (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1990 | ISBN-10: 0963975900 | ISBN-13: 978-0963975904

Dr. Immanuel Velikovsky's unconventional theories of the origin of the solar system have generated immense interest and bitter controversy. One of his best know critics has been Dr. Carl Sagan of Cornel University.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 343 pages
• Publisher: Charles Ginenthal (September 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0963975900
• ISBN-13: 978-0963975904
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,642,312 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

74 of 78 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars My introduction to catastrophic theory, November 20, 2000

By 

Wade Frazier (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky (Paperback)

While researching Carl Sagan's debunker career, I stumbled into Charles Ginenthal's book about five years ago. It has been an interesting experience to glimpse the world of catastrophism. I have corresponded and talked with most of the main players in the Velikovskian debate today, have read thousands of pages of material, traded plenty of mail, and have read thousands of emails regarding the issue. I have heard Ginenthal called an "apologist" for Velikovsky by a prominent Velikovsky follower, yet the harshest critic of Velikovsky's followers admitted to me that Sagan was less than straightforward in his critique of Velikovsky's work, and that the scientific establishment treated Velikovsky shabbily, with Sagan leading the underhanded attack. As Ginenthal makes clear, the issue of his book is not if Velikovsky was right, but how the scientific establishment treated him.

Like it or not, Ginenthal's book is nearly the only book on the Velikovsky controversy in print these days. It is a lucid introduction to the issues. Velikovsky is one in a long line of catastrophic theorists, and catastrophic theory has been gaining scientific respectability these days, as well as movies being made of comets slamming into earth (though Velikovsky theorized planetary catastrophic agents instead of comets).

I have spent long hours trying to assess Velikovsky's thesis. I had to admit that it would take me many years to properly assess his widely interdisciplinary thesis, and I plan to take up the assessment of an aspect of his work in the near future, as a hobby. I will not have anything worthwhile to say on the subject for at least ten years. While I do not subscribe to Velikovsky's planetary billiards scenario, I also cannot call his work worthless. His work is still relevant, fifty years after it was first published. While many works of science and scholarship rapidly fade to oblivion, that Velikovsky's theories are still heatedly debated today is a testament to their worth in being considered. While I have seen Ginenthal take serious heat for his book, on charges of sloppily and/or dishonest science and scholarship, it would be well for the reader to compare Ginenthal's book to Sagan's AAAS undertaker's job on Velikovsky's thesis, reproduced in Scientists Confront Velikovsky. Ginenthal addresses virtually every sentence of Sagan's critique. Sagan betrayed his sense of fair play after dealing Velikovsky's work its public deathblow at the AAAS conference (which the astronomer Tom Van Flandern called a "sneak attack"), as he never engaged in a public discussion of Velikovsky's work again. That is not the practice of honest science, but the work of a hack, using his reputation to outweigh his arguments. In that respect, Ginenthal is to be commended for his work, as he exposes critical aspects of Sagan's execution of his debunker's craft.

Others are more critical of Ginenthal's work than I am, while others laud it. Depending on whom you talk to, he gets one star or five. It is an extremely polarized discussion. I will go for the middle-of-the-road, giving him three stars, and lean towards more stars, not less, at this time. After years of looking into the matter, I have to reserve my judgment, except to agree that Sagan was indeed a poor and even dishonest debunker, not only regarding Velikovsky's thesis, but also in other areas on science's fringes... Whatever one might say about Ginenthal, he ably defends his work (has admitted some of his errors to me) and is generous with his time. You could do much worse than spend your time and money on Ginenthal's book.

25 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars For Non-hero-worshipers, March 23, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky (Paperback)

The conflicts between Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky are summarized clearly and verifiably in Charles Ginenthal's book. Their conflict is as much between philosophies and politics as between their concepts of geological history.

Sagan embraced Uniformitarianism, which seems to ASSUME that no great astronomical events involved the earth during the history of man. This is very convenient in describing times past because his definition of historical dates simply involves drawing a straight line to some suitably remote event-time reference. All human recollections are now seemingly insignificant and may be dismissed because OBSERVATIONS of the past are now "unscientific," and the accompanying documented and logical human fears (of comets) may be discarded as mere superstition.

Velikovsky's reintroduction of catastrophism was almost necessitated because he ACCEPTED the historical accounts from the Veda, Koran, and pre-historic Mexico, as well as the more accessible Biblical accounts. Catastrophism seems to offer a more believable theory since its prime causal elements are obvious and easily definable. V's theory might better have assumed that Venus was an ESCAPED MOON of Jupiter from within the huge gap in orbital radii between Callisto and Leda; but during a near approach (collision) the gravitational effects of Venus, with its mass at 82% that of the Earth's, could surely have caused an enormous tide such as the Great Flood, increased volcanic activity, and disturbance of subterranean insects and vermin in a subsequent approach. It could also have created rifts in the lithosphere which led to the tectonic shifts not yet accepted by science at the time V wrote "Worlds in Collision," and it might have been those tectonic shifts which effected the quick-freezing of the mammoths and mastadons. Sagan's Uniformitarianism, in contrast, postulates only vague undefinable internal forces to cause the SLOW initiation of nearly all global events.

"Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky" is an excellent summary of both sides of the controversy. Ginenthal's evidence that Sagan blocked the peer-reviews for V's efforts, of course, is denied by his hero-worshipers. Maybe Velikovsky's theory IS science-fiction, but ANY reconstruction (i.e. guess) of the past, such as Sagan's, is too. Non-hero-worshipers will enjoy this book.

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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential networking of scientific communities opinions, March 15, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky (Paperback)

In an age of specialization, a book such as this is essential for the layman who can only get information from the mass media and the individual scientist stuck in the small cubicle of his own specialty. Charles Ginenthal really did a lot of research. This book brings much light into a 50 year old debate in the scientific community and demonstrates that we have learned a lot about the world we live on since Velikovsky wrote "Worlds in Collision". The only detraction for me was that Carl Sagan came out so small that his devotees, unable to take off their "uniformatarian" blinders, will write bad reviews of this work even if they have not read it.