Word: comets
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...three physical science critiques offered of Velikovsky's cosmic conception that appear in the book, Sagan's is the most accessible to the non-scientist. Sagan uses basic physical and chemical theory to attack the ideas of repeated planetary collisions and of the involvement of a comet in the stopping of the earth's rotation (along with the falling of manna from Heaven). He concludes, "To rescue the hypothesis requires special pleading, the vague invention of new physics, and selective inattention to a plethora of conflicting evidence...
...arguments is not immediately self-evident, but the post-symposium rebuttal offered by Velikovskyites to Sagan does not seem sufficient to resurrect Worlds in Collision. For instance, the rebuttal, appearing in Pensee states that Sagan had ignored the possibility that the molten state in which he says a comet would be ejected from Jupiter could later serve as a possible source of Velikovsky's hypothetical, captured-comet-turned-planet Venus's heat. Sagan reasonably argues, however, that rather than staying in a molten mass the ejected material "would have been entirely reduced toa train of self-gravitating small dust particles...
...Technology. Though he is the author of some two dozen scientific papers, he has neither a Ph.D. nor a coterie of doting graduate students. What Kowal, 37, does have is a discerning eye and an insatiable appetite for scanning the sky. During the past decade, he has discovered one comet and five more that had somehow been "lost" as well as the 13th-and what may prove to be the 14th-moon of Jupiter, and 80 supernovas, or exploding stars. Last week Kowal announced an even more remarkable sighting: a small, faint object orbiting the sun between Saturn and Uranus...
Marsden said, however, "It could be a peculiar kind of comet." He added he could not reject the possibility that it is a comet, because of a theory postulated in the '50s that comets could originate in the vicinity of Uranus and Neptune...
...Eric J. Chaison, assistant professor of Astronomy, said yesterday, "The fact that we haven't seen it yet implies that it has just appeared in the solar system, like a comet...