Immanuel Velikovsky stirred up a hornets nest in 1950 with his “Worlds in Collision.” His book single-handedly upset
the corner-stone of the Theory of Uniformitarianisn, which held that the forces we observe today are the same forces that shaped our planet in the past. Velikovsky cited evidence that cataclysmic changes must have occurred in the past: large deposits of splintered trees and shattered animal bones piled up against mountains, and bodies of frozen mammoths found with tropical plants still in their stomachs. What was really revolutionary about Velikovsky’ books, is that he paid serious attention to ancient records of peoples all over the world
describing planets fighting in the sky. They thought the planets were gods, but Velikovsky felt they were describing what they observed. Paradoxically, most of these ancient observations, regardless of which peoples held them, seemed to be describing the same events.
A successful psychiatrist in Israel, and, obviously, a brilliant and well read man, Velikovsky left Israel and moved to New York in the 1940’s to put together his thoughts in a series of books. His first three books “Worlds in Collision” (1950), “Ages in Chaos” (1952), and “Earth in Upheaval” (1955) rocked the
scientific world with solid evidence that the forces operating on Earth weren’t always the same in the past. Although his books were well-researched and made sense, some well-known members the scientific community reacted surprisingly hostile to Velikovsky. It’s now fifty-seven years later, and much of what Velikovsky proposed is today accepted, but Velikovsky, throughout the remaining twenty-nine years of his life, was ridiculed and ostracized by the mainstream scientific community.
Velikovsky has not been forgotten, and his unfair and prejudicial treatment has tarnished the reputation of more than one prominent scientist. His daughter Ruth Velikovsky Sharon, herself a psychiatrist, wrote “Immanuel Velikovsky: The Truth Behind the Torment” about how this rejection affected her father. Her book contains over a hundred pieces of correspondence between her father and well-known scientists concerning his work, some sympathetic, but many hostile and unfair. The anguish she felt seeing the torment her father experienced is obvious in her book.