Planetary billiards
Despite all this utter bullshit, Velikovsky's legacy lives to this day: his planetary billiards paved the way to Zecharia Sitchin's planet Nibiru, which in turn mutated into Nancy Lieder's Planet X, which is one of the contenders for the late 2012 end-of-the-world scare, which has gone the way of all other such predictions by experiencing the ultimate refutation. Internet crank Robert W. Felix has piled a good deal of his own nonsense on top of Velikovsky's pseudo-scholarship. However we may hope, this hasn't disappeared since 2012 December 22. Another fantastic development of Velikovsky's planetary science centres around Saturn, and the novel notion that Earth orbited it within human memory, before the Sun came along and spoilt everything, never mind that the Sun preceded them both.
Electric Universe
Velikovsky's ideas are arguably the origin of the various Electric Universe claims, a fertile area generally centred on the notion that electromagnetism is the dominant force in the cosmos, and gravity is not. Velikovsky did not push very strongly on this issue after he first raised it, possibly because he realized that many people with a basic knowledge of astronomy would be aware that the effect of gravity on the motion of the planets is a very well understood phenonenom.
[edit]Alternative chronologies
See the main article on this topic: Alternate historical chronology
Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series provided a starting point for a plethora of armchair scholars to devise new and exciting chronologies for Egypt, the Near and Middle East, and even Europe. The general methodology is to claim that "dark ages" in the historical record are imaginary, and arise from bogus falsely-inflated dynasty lists and the like, which contain made-up centuries containing rulers who never existed. Another trick is to claim that historical figures listed in the annals of different sources (e.g. writings of Greeks such as Herodotus, versus Egyptian hieroglyphics) are actually "alter-egos" of each other, and correspond to the same people, rather than different rulers from different centuries.
Proponents have even made it to successful TV series and books, such as the 'New Chronology' of David Rohl. Other names in the field include Gunnar Heinsohn and Peter James (author of Centuries of Darkness). Much use is made of obscure Assyrian king lists and Pharaohs.
The major difficulty with these methods is that they tend to focus on facile comparisons of names and dynasties, which gloss over the detailed archeological evidence from the ground, or mundane information about everyday life in these periods which show clearly that the proposed chronologies are bullshit.
A particularly extreme version of these methodologies sees claims that there are 'phantom centuries' in the history of AD Europe. A popular notion is that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne did not exist. Writers such as Herbert Illig and Gunnar Heinsohn have peddled ideas arguing that many of the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and circa 1200 AD simply did not exist. To support this, they claim that there was a vast continent-wide conspiracy to fabricate historical documents and chronicles. It is not entirely clear what was to be gained from such wholesale deceit; one hypothesis is that it was created by a crooked Pope and/or Holy Roman Emperor who wanted to be able to say that they reigned during the year 1000.
Trumping all of this is Russian writer Anatoly Fomenko, who manages to go so far in truncating history that he claims the Great Wall of China was not built until the 1950s. It is not unusual for their theories to be apparently motivated by strains of nationalism.
Despite all this utter bullshit, Velikovsky's legacy lives to this day: his planetary billiards paved the way to Zecharia Sitchin's planet Nibiru, which in turn mutated into Nancy Lieder's Planet X, which is one of the contenders for the late 2012 end-of-the-world scare, which has gone the way of all other such predictions by experiencing the ultimate refutation. Internet crank Robert W. Felix has piled a good deal of his own nonsense on top of Velikovsky's pseudo-scholarship. However we may hope, this hasn't disappeared since 2012 December 22. Another fantastic development of Velikovsky's planetary science centres around Saturn, and the novel notion that Earth orbited it within human memory, before the Sun came along and spoilt everything, never mind that the Sun preceded them both.
Electric Universe
Velikovsky's ideas are arguably the origin of the various Electric Universe claims, a fertile area generally centred on the notion that electromagnetism is the dominant force in the cosmos, and gravity is not. Velikovsky did not push very strongly on this issue after he first raised it, possibly because he realized that many people with a basic knowledge of astronomy would be aware that the effect of gravity on the motion of the planets is a very well understood phenonenom.
[edit]Alternative chronologies
See the main article on this topic: Alternate historical chronology
Velikovsky's Ages in Chaos series provided a starting point for a plethora of armchair scholars to devise new and exciting chronologies for Egypt, the Near and Middle East, and even Europe. The general methodology is to claim that "dark ages" in the historical record are imaginary, and arise from bogus falsely-inflated dynasty lists and the like, which contain made-up centuries containing rulers who never existed. Another trick is to claim that historical figures listed in the annals of different sources (e.g. writings of Greeks such as Herodotus, versus Egyptian hieroglyphics) are actually "alter-egos" of each other, and correspond to the same people, rather than different rulers from different centuries.
Proponents have even made it to successful TV series and books, such as the 'New Chronology' of David Rohl. Other names in the field include Gunnar Heinsohn and Peter James (author of Centuries of Darkness). Much use is made of obscure Assyrian king lists and Pharaohs.
The major difficulty with these methods is that they tend to focus on facile comparisons of names and dynasties, which gloss over the detailed archeological evidence from the ground, or mundane information about everyday life in these periods which show clearly that the proposed chronologies are bullshit.
A particularly extreme version of these methodologies sees claims that there are 'phantom centuries' in the history of AD Europe. A popular notion is that the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne did not exist. Writers such as Herbert Illig and Gunnar Heinsohn have peddled ideas arguing that many of the years between the fall of the Roman Empire and circa 1200 AD simply did not exist. To support this, they claim that there was a vast continent-wide conspiracy to fabricate historical documents and chronicles. It is not entirely clear what was to be gained from such wholesale deceit; one hypothesis is that it was created by a crooked Pope and/or Holy Roman Emperor who wanted to be able to say that they reigned during the year 1000.
Trumping all of this is Russian writer Anatoly Fomenko, who manages to go so far in truncating history that he claims the Great Wall of China was not built until the 1950s. It is not unusual for their theories to be apparently motivated by strains of nationalism.
I am The Alpha And The Omega: The Beginning and The End
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