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To: Hawkmoon who wrote (250)	1/3/2001 4:53:08 PM
From: Carolyn	Respond to of 23908

I love that Einstein quote. So true!

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (250)	1/3/2001 7:18:48 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

One thing you can say about Einstein - he really was an Einstein.

To: Hawkmoon who wrote (250)	1/4/2001 9:59:19 PM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 23908

We were talking about how a group of eminent scientists banded together to censor and discredit Velikovsky. Here is a snippet from Jerry Pournelle's site that explains what happened. ....Velikovsky wasn't entirely without evidence, and Hogan summarizes that fairly well. Most was derived from archeological astronomical records, but it has long been a principle of astronomy that an observation is not negated merely by its age. Eventually, Velikovsky persuaded enough people that Big Science had to pay attention. The attention they paid was shameful. One group of otherwise reputable scientists actually threatened the MacMillan company, which had originally published Velikovsky's book, with a boycott of their text books on the grounds that a company that would publish a popular work like Velikovsky's was probably so tainted that their textbooks were contaminated and worthless. MacMillan took the extraordinary step, unprecedented in my experience, of ceasing to publish a book on the best selling list and allowing Doubleday, which had no text line, to have a surely profitable book. The leader of this particular bit of scientific inquisition was Harlow Shapely, Harvard astronomer and otherwise respectable scientist. Another bit of attention was arranging a 'debate' at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Velikovsky, an aged psychiatrist with a thick Viennese accent -- he was of Freud's generation and had been a junior associate of Freud -- was pitted against Carl Sagan, and if there was a referee or moderator he didn't do much. Sagan wisecracked through the whole 'debate', never once confronting anything Velikovsky said, and mostly using his verbal skills to ridicule the old man. It was as shameful a thing as I ever saw Carl do. jerrypournelle.com