As a Supplement to Alex Wellerstein's Review of Michael Gordin's the Pseudoscience Wars

None of my critics can erase the magnetosphere, nobody can stop the noises of Jupiter, nobody can cool off Venus, and nobody can change a single sentence in my books. — Immanuel Velikovsky, 25 February 1974

As a supplement to Alex Wellerstein's review of Michael Gordin's The Pseudoscience Wars: Immanuel Velikovsky and the Birth of the Modern Fringe, we have posted recordings (Audio files S1 to S5) of three of the talks and subsequent discussions from the symposium "Velikovsky's challenge to science" at the 1974 annual AAAS meeting, San Francisco (fig. S1). The files have been created from audio cassette tapes held by the AAAS Archives.

The symposium comprised presentations by sociologist Norman W. Storer, statistician and amateur Assyriologist Peter Huber, Velikovsky, physicist J. Derral Mulholland, astronomer Carl Sagan, and physicist Irving Michelson; question-and-answer periods following the talks; and an evening session intended for informal discussion. Velikovsky and Sagan spoke for far longer than scheduled, pushing two papers into the evening. The clashes drew a considerable audience (estimates range from 500 to the room's capacity of 1500; Gordin believes the actual number was closer to the latter).

As Gordin notes, disagreements over the length of his rebuttals led Velikovsky to withdraw from the planned symposium volume. His opponents' papers appeared in a collection edited by Donald Goldsmith (2). Velikovsky and Michelsen (whose work supported of some of his ideas) published their contributions in Pensée (3, 4), a journal that devoted its entire content to Velikovsky's ideas. Transcripts of the question and answer exchanges, edited by Lynn E. Rose, were subsequently published as well (5). – Sherman J. Suter

References and Notes

1. I. Velikovsky, Worlds in Collision (Macmillan, New York, 1950).

2. D. Goldsmith, Ed., Scientists Confront Velikovsky (Cornell Univ. Press, Ithaca, NY, 1977).

3. I. Velikovsky, My challenge to conventional views in science. Pensée 4 (2), 10–14 (1974).

4. I. Michelson, Mechanics bears witness. Pensée 4 (2), 15–21 (1974).

5. L. E. Rose, Transcripts of the morning and evening sessions of the AAS symposium on "Velikovsky's challenge to science" held on February 25, 1974. In Stephen J. Gould and Immanuel Velikovsky: Essays in the Continuing Velikovsky Affair, D. A. Pearlman, Ed. (Ivy, Forest Hills, NY, 1996), pp. 727–795.

Acknowledgments

We thank the AAAS Archives and N. Rosado-Blake for providing the audio tapes from the 1974 syposium.

Fig. S1. Symposium line-up. From the AAAS 140th Annual Meeting Program, San Francisco, 24 February to 1 March 1974.