Book Home Famous Authors Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky was a Russian-born scientist and writer who believed that many of the catastrophes and catastrophes described in ancient texts were the result of actual cosmic events. He argued that the planet Venus was the same planet as the goddess Venus of mythology and was the cause of a world-wide cataclysm in historical times. Velikovsky's work sparked a major controversy in the scientific community and his claims remain largely rejected by mainstream science.

Velikovsky was born in 1895 in what is now the Russian Federation. He graduated from the University of Moscow with a degree in medicine and later emigrated to the United States in 1939. It was in the US that Velikovsky began to develop his theories about cosmic collisions and other catastrophes. He studied ancient written texts and noted similarities between events described in the texts and events recorded in astronomical observations. He argued that these were the result of a near-collision between Venus and the Earth.

Velikovsky's views quickly attracted a great deal of both public and academic controversy. His views were rejected by the majority of academic scientists, who considered the evidence Velikovsky presented to be scientifically unreliable. Velikovsky's most famous work, Worlds in Collision, garnered such a strong backlash from the scientific community that the publisher revised it to make it publicly acceptable. Velikovsky himself reacted negatively to this change and accused the scientific community of censorship.

Despite the controversy surrounding Worlds in Collision, Velikovsky's work is still read and is still discussed in academic circles. His theories suggest that there may be a greater degree of physical interaction between planets and other cosmic bodies than current scientific consensus might suggest. This idea in particular remains a popular topic of debate and has recently been revived in the form of the Gaia hypothesis, which suggests that the Earth is a self-regulating system which interacts with the rest of the universe.

Velikovsky died in 1979, but his legacy lives on. His ideas have made an impact on science, inspiring scientists and researchers to rethink planetary relationships and cosmic collisions. Velikovsky is also remembered for his pioneering attempt to bridge the gap between scientific research and cultural myth. By bringing together evidence from ancient texts and observations, Velikovsky suggested a new way of interpreting ancient stories and linking them to the physical universe.

Immanuel Velikovsky's work and theories have withstood the test of time and remain a source of fascination to many scientists and historians who are exploring the boundaries of current scientific theory. While Velikovsky remains largely dismissed by mainstream science, his work continues to challenge accepted dogma and to remind us of the possibility that there may be more to the universe than we currently know.

Books by Velikovsky

Published by The Macmillan Company:

• Worlds in Collision (1950)

Published by Doubleday:

• Worlds in Collision (1950)
• Ages in Chaos (1952)
• Earth In Upheaval (1955)
• Oedipus and Akhnaton (1960)
• Peoples of the Sea (1977)
• Rameses II and His Times (1978)
• Mankind in Amnesia (1982)

Published by William Morrow:

• Stargazers and Gravediggers (1983)