Worlds in Collision

Worlds in Collision is a book by Immanuel Velikovsky published in 1950. It proposes that around the fifteenth century BCE the planet Venus was ejected from Jupiter as a comet or comet-like object and passed near the Earth, without an actual collision being described. According to the thesis, this passage altered the Earth's orbit and axial inclination, causing countless catastrophes which, in the author's view, are recorded in the earliest mythologies and religious traditions around the world. Half a century later Venus approached again and briefly halted the Earth's rotation, and in the eighth and seventh centuries BCE Mars, itself displaced by Venus, supposedly caused further disturbances. The present celestial order was then established.

Velikovsky reached these conclusions through a method that would today be called comparative mythology: he sought correspondences among the myths and written histories of cultures with no known contact, read literally as accounts of the deeds of planetary deities. He identified Zeus with Jupiter and Athena with Venus, and drew on narratives from Egypt, Israel, Mesoamerica and Assyria to support his hypothesis. From these premises he derived claims such as that Venus must still be very hot and rich in hydrocarbons, and that Jupiter emits radio noises, ideas he tied to an electromagnetic mechanism able to influence planetary motion.

The book appeared in April 1950 and was a commercial success: it became a New York Times bestseller and remained on its lists for weeks. The scientific community, however, rejected it almost unanimously. Astronomers pointed out that its celestial mechanics were incompatible with Newtonian laws and with the conservation of energy and angular momentum. In 1979 Carl Sagan further criticised the book for ignoring that Venus's high surface temperature was already known before its publication and for misunderstanding its cause, overlooking the greenhouse effect described earlier by Rupert Wildt. The pressure led Macmillan to transfer the book to Doubleday only a few months after its release. Today it is regarded as a classic example of pseudoscience and catastrophism, though it remains of interest as a cultural phenomenon of its time.