Word: sagan
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...Carl Sagan, professor of astronomy and space sciences at Cornell, summed up the low opinion of Velikovsky held by most scientists when he said, "Where Velikovsky is original he is very likely wrong; and where he is right the idea has been preempted by earlier workers. There are also a large number of cases where he is neither right nor original...
Since 1974, Sagan has rewritten and expanded his attack on Velikovsky for publication in the new book, Scientists Confront Velikovsky. In addition to Sagan's remarks and the transcribed speeches of three other AAAS symposium participants--a sociologist, a statistician, and another astronomer--the collection contains a fresh treatment of Velikovsky by a NASA astronomer. The fact that Velikovsky's contribution--which along with Sagan's speech highlighted the meeting--is missing from the book is at first surprising. However, examination of the history of the Velikovsky controversy and of the publishers' unpublished correspondence with him makes the absence...
...response to these accusations--as well as Velikovsky's assertions that recent space missions and experiments had confirmed his predictions--Sagan came up with the idea of the AAAS forum. While Gaposchkin was still labeling Velikovsky's books as nonsense (at the same time as she admitted not having read any of them), Sagan and the others had recognized that by ignoring and slandering Velikovsky, scientists had made him into a public martyr. Direct confrontation was called...
...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...
...Dragons of Eden, Sagan (4) 7. Essays of E.B. White, White 8. The Path Between the Seas, McCullough (9) 9. Your Erroneous Zones, Dyer (6) 10. The Managerial Woman, Henning & Jardim...