Vendor
	Fletcher Agency Melissa Chinchillo
Original language
English

THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF WARS

Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe

What counts as a science? How does one establish the boundary between science and non-science? How does science produce knowledge?
Princeton Professor Michael Gordin investigates these questions as political history. He offers a new way to think about the boundary between "legitimate" and "illegitmate" scientific claims.

Gordin traces the beginnings of modern pseudoscience back to the "Velikovsky Affairs" and reveals what was new about this reaction to a "fringe" scientific claim. Many arguments attacked as "pseudoscience" simply argue for wider error bars or greater uncertainty (tobacco science, climate change skeptics, etc.).

THE PSEUDOSCIENCE OF WARS centers on the betselling book that spawned modern pseudoscience: in April 1950, Immanuel Velikovsky's "Worlds in Collision" was published and skyrocketed to the top of non-fiction best-seller lists. Its author became a countercultural superstar with his "fringe" science claims that ancient texts from a variety of cultures describe global catastrophes that actually happened. To Vilikovsky, these descriptions were not metaphors of ecstatic visions, but accurate reporting dressed up in poetic language.

These passages had been interpreted as metaphors, or ecstatic visions. Not so, argued Velikovsky: when you looked at them together, they pointed toward a massive global catastrophe that actually happened. "Worlds in Collision" tracked two main catastrophes: one that happened around 1500 B.C., which is known today as the Exodus of the Children of Israel from Egypt; and another that happened on 23 March 687 B.C., which changed the length of the year from 360 days to its current 3651?4 days, stunning the prophet Isaiah and chronicled as the battle between Athena and Ares in Homer's Iliad.

MICHAEL D. GORDIN is Associate Professor of History at Princeton University, where he teaches the history of modern science. He is the author of three books, the most recent being Red Cloud at Dawn: Truman, Stalin, and the End of the Atomic Monopoly (FSG, 2009).