IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKV AD E CTA $1.96 $2.26 IN CANADA WORLDS IN COLLISION WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR ) A A Delta Book Other books by Immanuel Velikovsky: AGES IN CHAOS OEDIPUS AND AKHNATON EARTH IN UPHEAVAL (also in a Delta edition WORLDS IN COLLISION IMMANUEL VELIKOVSKY a delta book Published by Dell Publishing Co., Inc. 750 Third Avenue, hew York, N.Y.. 10017 Copyright, 1950, by Immanuel Velikovsky Delta ® TM 755118, Dell Publishing Co., Inc. AH rights reserved Reprinted by arrangement with Doubleday ir Co., Inc., New York Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 52-2250 First Delta printing— January, 1965 Manufactured in the United States of America Twelfth Printing The author gratefully acknowledges permission to quote from the following books: G. A. Dorsey, The Pawnee, Mythology, Carnegie Institution of Wash- ington, 1906; Maimonides: The Guide for the Perplexed, translated M. Fried- lander, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1928; Clements R. Markham, The Incas of Peru, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1910.; Shakuntala and other writings of Kalidasa, transl. A. W. Ryder, Everyman’s Library, E. P. Dutton, Inc., 1912; James Moffatt, The Bible: A New Translation, copyright, 1935, Harper & Brothers. The Loeb Classical Library, Harvard University Press: Homer, The Iliad, trans. A. T. Murray, 1925; Hesiod, Theogony, transl. H. Evelyn-White, 1914; Euripides, Electro, transl. A. S. Way, 1919; Plato, Timaeus, transl. R. C. Bury, 1920, and The Statesman (Politicus), transl. H. N. Fowler, 1925; Apollodorus, The Library, transl. B. Frazer, J. 1921; Seneca, Thyestes, transl. F. J. Miller, 1917; Virgil! Georgies, transl. H. R. Fairclough, 1920; Ovid, Metamorphoses, transl. F. L. Miller, 1916; Philo, The Eternity of the World, transl. F. H. Colson, 1941; Plutarch, Life of Numa. transl. B. Perrin. 1914. Louis Ginzberg. The Legends the Jews copyright, of , 1910, 1928, The Jewish Publication Society of America; L. de Cambrey, Lapland Legends, Yale University Press. 1926; The Philosophy of Spinoza, ed. J. Ratner, copyright, 1927, Modem Library, Random House, Inc.; R. A. Daly, Our Mobile Earth, copyright, 1926, Charles Scribner’s Sons; Evelyn Stefansson, Here Is Alaska, copyright, 1943, Charles Scribner’s Sons; J. F. Fleming, Terrestrial Magnetism and Electricity, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1939. To Elisheva PREFACE to the Delta edition of Worlds in Collision ( 1965) First published in 1950, this book was left unchanged in all sub- sequent printings 1 nor have any textual changes been made in this ; first paperbound. Delta, edition. This was so by design: I wished to keep the text in its original form in order that, unaltered, it should face all subsequent discoveries in the fields it covers or touches upon. Should there have been changes, the reader of a new edition would be unable to judge to what extent a book, heretical in 1950, could measure up to later developments. In 1950 it was generally assumed that the fundamentals of science were all known and that only details and decimals were left to fill in. In the same year, a cosmologist, certainly not of a conservative bent of mind, Fred Hoyle, wrote in the conclusion of his book, The Nature of the Universe: “Is it likely that any astonishing new devel- opments are lying in wait for us? Is it possible that the cosmology of 500 years hence will extend as far beyond our present beliefs as our cosmology goes beyond that of Newton?” And he continued: “I doubt whether this will be so. I am prepared to believe that there will be many advances in the detailed understanding of matters present that still baffle us. But by and large I think that our picture will turn out to bear an approximate resemblance to the cosmologies of the future,” and he referred to the limitations of 1 By the summer of 1964 15 hard-cover printings in the United States, and 14 in Great Britain. viii WORLDS IN COLLISION optical means in penetrating the depth of space. The years that have passed since the publication of Worlds in Collision have seen the first great achievements in radio astronomy, the discoveries of the International Geophysical Year, and the dawn of the space age. The picture has changed completely. Signs of recent violence, disruption, and fragmentation have been observed on earth and elsewhere in the solar system: a submarine gigantic canyon that runs almost twice around the globe—a sign of a global twist; a layer of ash of extraterrestrial origin underlying all oceans; paleomagnetic evidence that the magnetic poles were suddenly and repeatedly reversed and, it is claimed, the terrestrial axis with them; gases escaping from some craters on the moon, thought to be cold to its center; an exceedingly high surface heat of Venus. Further- more, with the discovery of radio signals arriving from Jupiter, of the existence of a magnetosphere surrounding the earth, of the solar plasma, of the net charge on the sun, and of the magnetic field per- meating the interplanetary space, decisive evidence has come up that the solar system, and the universe in general, are not electro- magnetically sterile—a basic change in the understanding of the universe, its nature, and the forces active in it. The words found in the Preface to the 1950 edition, designating the work as heresy in realms where the names of Newton and Darwin reign supreme, should no longer evoke the same spontaneous re- jection on the part of even the most conservative in science, unless it is a defense mechanism devised to protect an inner realization of incertitude. “What, to the scientist, constitutes a really satisfactory sort of success for a theory? The answer lies largely in the words generality, elegance, control, and prediction.”2 As to generality, hardly anyone raised an objection. Possibly there was some elegance in the timing: when these words were written in 1960, ten years after the publica- tion of my book and the great opposition it provoked, some of the most compelling data were radioed by the space vehicle, Pioneer V. 2 Warren Weaver, “The Imperfections of Science,” Proc. of the Amer. Philos. Soc., Oct. 17, 1960. WORLDS IN COLLISION ix I would like to relate here a few details about the control and pre- diction of two crucial tests, decisive for this book. Early in my work I came to the understanding that Venus is a newcomer to the planetary family, that it had a stormy if only short history, and that it must still be very hot and “giving off heat”; further, that it must be surrounded by a very extensive envelope of hydrocarbon (petroleum) gases and dust. Such claims were in total disagreement with what was known in 1946 when I completed the manuscript of the work or in 1950 when it was published. To stress the crucial nature of these claims, they were put under the headings “The Gases of Venus” and “The Thermal Balance of Venus” immediately preceding the section, “The End.” Should I be right in these claims, the entire chain of deductions—of which the identification of the extraterrestrial agent of the paroxysms de- scribed is but the final ring—is strengthened. And since these crucial claims were in flagrant discord with accepted values, in case of confirmation they ought not to be denoted as lucky guesses. As late as 1959, Venus’ ground temperature was calculated to be only 17°C, three degrees above the mean annual temperature of the Earth. But by 1961, from the nature of the radio signals emitted by Venus, it was found that Venus’ ground temperature is about 315°C, or 600°F. Dr. F. D. Drake of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, responsible for this reading, wrote: “We would have expected a temperature only slightly greater than that of the earth,” and the find was “a surprise ... in a field in which the fewest surprises were expected.” There was admittedly no satisfactory explanation of such high temperature of Venus in the frame of the accepted notions. Green- house effect could not explain so high a temperature, nor could radioactivity decaying for billions of years. The Mariner II, the space vehicle that passed Venus in December, 1962, was instru- mented to detect whether the heat is real and as high as 600°. It found it real and a full 800°. It found, also, that the night side of Venus is, if anything, hotter than the day side and that light does not penetrate the cloud cover. It must be gloomy and bleak under X WORLD S IN COLLISION this cover, it is stated in the Mariner report by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; very little greenhouse effect could realize itself under such conditions. The other crucial test concerned the gaseous envelope of the planet. In 1946, four years before the publication of this book, I directed a request and inquiry to Professor R. Wildt of Yale and the late Professor W. S. Adams of Mount Wilson and Palomar observa- tories, foremost authorities on the subject of planetary atmosphere, indicating that the presence of hydrocarbon gases and dust in the cloud envelope of VenCis would constitute a crucial test for the cosmological concepts evolved from the study of historical sources. Wildt wrote on September 13, 1946: “The absorption spectrum of Venus’ atmosphere cannot be interpreted as resulting from gaseous hydrocarbons.” Adams answered (September 9, 1946): “There is no evidence of the presence of hydrocarbon gas in the atmosphere of Venus.” I must have been completely firm in my belief of not having made a wrong deduction—from the first premise of global catastrophe to the last one, of identifying the agent—to have chosen to print, in disregard of the expert opinions: “On the basis of this research, I assume that Venus must be rich in petroleum gases.” On February 26, 1963, making known the results of the Mariner probe, Dr.