Academic witch-hunt of the century

books:


	• Stargazers and Gravediggers: Memoirs to Worlds in Collision Immanuel Velikovsky William Morrow & Co, 1983 - 346 pages average customer review:based on 1 review
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Academic witch-hunt of the century

This book outlines what will probably, in future times, be regarded as about the worst example of scientific suppression ever to take place. After being vetted and passed by a number of scientists, Velikovsky's first book (Worlds in Collision) became a bestseller overnight. No sooner had it been released however than a group of scientists, led by Professor Harlow Shapley of Harvard, threatened the publishers (Macmillan) with a boycott of their books if they did not get rid of the offending title. Since Macmillan made about 80% of their profits from textbook sales, they were forced to ask Velikovsky to take his book elsewhere. (Shapley and co had earlier attempted to prevent the book being published at all). Having threatened his publisher, they then embarked on a sustained campaign of misrepresentation, designed to destroy Velikovsky's reputation. Since Shapley and co controlled the media organs of academia, this campaign succeeded. Velikovsky was never allowed to reply to the grotesque caracatures of his theories which appeared regularly in such journals as Nature and Scientific American. It soon then became part of "accepted wisdom" that Velikovsky had been diproved - which he had not. In contrast to the petty-mindedness of Shapley and co (many of whom boasted of never having read the book they criticised), Albert Einstein remained a close friend of Velikovsky, agreed with him that he had proved beyond question that world-wide catastrophes had affected the early development of civilisation, and died with a heavily-annotated copy of "Worlds in Collision" on his desk.

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