Controversy

"If, occasionally, historical evidence does not square with formulated laws, it should be remembered that a law is but a deduction from experience and experiment, and therefore laws must conform with historical facts, not facts with laws."
-- Immanuel Velikovsky

(picture of Venus through a violet filter)

Velikovsky had a very strange idea, that of Venus causing many natural disasters of the past.  Although accused of being a crackpot, he came to this conclusion for the most part by using scientifically accepted methods. After having his book rejected by 12 publishers Macmillan finally agreed to publish Worlds in Collision it immediately became a #1 best seller for seven weeks 'till Macmillan dropped the book while it was still on the best seller list. It was dropped after a few Harvard professors and astronomers (who didn't like Velikovsky) requested it to, or else they would boycott Macmillan press. Velikovsky got more bad press from Harvard and faded out of the spotlight for several years until many of his predictions were realized to be true as soon as the space exploration project begun. Most established scientists didn't like the attention Velikovsky's ideas were getting, among his critics were Carl Sagan. If Velikovsky's ideas aren't controversial enough; there was a big controversy over the behavior of Sagan and other scientist related to the AAAS symposium in the early seventies, the claim is that the symposium was rigged to not give Velikovsky a chance to defend his ideas.  Books such as Scientists Confront Velikovsky and Scientists Confront Scientists who Confront Velikovsky were written on the subject.