="Henry Baker" <hbaker1@pipeline.com> While Velikovsky probably had no serious scientific reason to suggest such drama, it has become clear that the cosmos isn't the "steady state" boring place that scientists had assumed so confidently earlier in my lifetime.
Yes. My comments were in no way intended to inhibit such speculations, just to note that good new ideas can resonate weirdly with rightly-rejected ones. The proponents of "punctuated equilibrium" felt the need to distinguish it from Velikovsky-style catastrophism. "Velikovsky is neither crank nor charlatan although... he is at least gloriously wrong..." --Stephan Jay Gould (per Wikipedia) Or there's Gosper's observation that enough epicycles actually could have accounted for any observed orbit...