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Speaker 1: The Thread is a new hit podcast from Ozzy Media

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Speaker 1: that explores history surprising connections in order to discover how

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Speaker 1: one thing leads to another, like how movie moguls in

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Speaker 1: early Hollywood helps spark the me Too movement Today, get

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Speaker 1: it on I Heart Radio or wherever you list Now,

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Speaker 1: here's a highlight from Coast to coast am on iHeart Radio.

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Speaker 1: Let's talk first of all this half about Emmanuel Velakovski.

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Speaker 1: He was a Russian born psychiatrist. He was historian. He

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Speaker 1: was a colleague of Albert Einstein. He came up with

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Speaker 1: a controversial theory about Venus tell Us about that it

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Speaker 1: was actually researching a historical book at Columbia University and

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Speaker 1: came across a papyrus that looked like he was talking

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Speaker 1: about the Ten Legues of Egypt. This would be a

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Speaker 1: historical historical support or academic support for a very controversial

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Speaker 1: um subject um. So he started to pursue that it

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Speaker 1: looked to him like this was reporting globe effects of

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Speaker 1: a calamity at ancient times. And he had access there

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Speaker 1: in Columbia's library to texts from all over the world.

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Speaker 1: He started comparing other texts from the same eras to

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Speaker 1: see if they were reporting the same thing, and they were.

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Speaker 1: And the interesting thing was that in every case they

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Speaker 1: discovered that the upheaval was assigned to a comment, but

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Speaker 1: the name that each culture assigned to it to their comet,

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Speaker 1: which could be different from culture to culture. Later on

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Speaker 1: became assigned to Venus as a planet, and he couldn't

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Speaker 1: understand why that was. And the more he looked, the

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Speaker 1: more it became clear to him that Venus was added

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Speaker 1: to the family of planets at that moment, that before

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Speaker 1: that time, none of the cultures accounted Venus as a planet.

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Speaker 1: So that makes him made him think that Venus must

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Speaker 1: be more recently formed than billions of years ago. Why

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Speaker 1: wouldn't they have seen it prior to three thousand and

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Speaker 1: he talked about Venus only being thousands of years old.

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Speaker 1: That's right, and that um conclusion carries with it um

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Speaker 1: a number of um effects that that he used as

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Speaker 1: um to make predictions about what would be found when

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Speaker 1: we actually ended up that Venus um. If Venus is

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Speaker 1: a young planet, then we would expect to find it

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Speaker 1: to be very hot. We got there, we discovered it

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Speaker 1: is so hot that probes melt on the surface. It's

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Speaker 1: a seven d degree surface that will melt lead. Um.

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Speaker 1: If it's a new planet that forms at a different

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Speaker 1: time than the other planets, then it should have differences

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Speaker 1: in rotation from other planets, which it does. It should

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Speaker 1: have a pristine surface, which it does. It should have um. Uh.

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Speaker 1: There shouldn't have been time for a core, a metallic

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Speaker 1: core to form in the center of Venus, and so

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Speaker 1: far there's been no confirmation of a core. They think

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Speaker 1: that's liquid or maybe a very young core. Um. All

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Speaker 1: sorts of different effects that the play out based on

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Speaker 1: the premise that Venus is young and his book Worlds

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Speaker 1: in Collision became a bestseller. Yet top academicians came out

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Speaker 1: of the woodwork layer to destroy the guy, didn't they Yeah,

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Speaker 1: these are people from Harvard University who did some really

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Speaker 1: unusual things. Um. First of all, they um flatly criticized

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Speaker 1: critique the book without however, having read it, on the

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Speaker 1: basis of just uh an advanced article that unpublished about

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Speaker 1: the book. They they um really slammed the book, tried

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Speaker 1: to get it not to be published. They ended up

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Speaker 1: um fomenting fomenting a boycott of the publisher McMillan and

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Speaker 1: company of their textbook division to try to arm to

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Speaker 1: with the publisher into the canceling the book, and McMillan

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Speaker 1: came up with a pretty good interesting solution to that.

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Speaker 1: They actually made the decision to transfer the rights to

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Speaker 1: a best selling novel to one of their rivals didn't

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Speaker 1: have a textbook division. They passed into Double Day as

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Speaker 1: a way of circumventing these academics. Now, since nineteen fifty,

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Speaker 1: haven't there been a long list of astronomical predictions made

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Speaker 1: by Velakowski that have come true. Yeah? Now, these, as

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Speaker 1: I said, these are all natural consequences of the premise

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Speaker 1: that Venus is a young planet. And since nineteen fifty,

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Speaker 1: even up until the present day, we have point after

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Speaker 1: point after point that Velakowski's surmised would be found to

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Speaker 1: be true about Venus and other planets, and each one

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Speaker 1: eventually comes to you in never a case. Every case,

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Speaker 1: the astronomers are saying, oh, no, no, that couldn't possibly

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Speaker 1: be true, and then eventually it turns out yes, it

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Speaker 1: sure is. One of one of the really controversial ones

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Speaker 1: was the claim that water would be found on the Moon.

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Speaker 1: Even Delakovki's closest friends said, look at you really gone

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Speaker 1: too far here, they're never gonna find water on the moon,

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Speaker 1: and sure enough they have. Now, how did he find

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Speaker 1: these things out? Well, as I said, it's just Velikowski worked. Um,

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Speaker 1: his method was a qualitative one like Einstein. Einstein had

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Speaker 1: spent a long time, long periods of time thinking about

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Speaker 1: the universe and how things work and come up with

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Speaker 1: conclusions based on on those those sort of thought experiments

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Speaker 1: he did, and Bevelokowski did the same thing with the

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Speaker 1: venus problem. Um, he said, if this is true, what

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Speaker 1: else can we expect to be true that would validate us?

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Speaker 1: Interesting and in terms of before he died, was he vindicated?

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Speaker 1: Belakowski really died sort of a broken broken man. There

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Speaker 1: had been a symposium in San Francisco that it was

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Speaker 1: organized by the A A S the American Association pretty

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Speaker 1: advanced most science, and they had invited critics of Lakowski,

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Speaker 1: like Carl Sagan and some other um popularizers of science

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Speaker 1: in the day, to come and make counterpresentations, you know,

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Speaker 1: against Lakowsky's claims. Um. It was sort of a hit

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Speaker 1: job in that Velakowski was not actually given time to

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Speaker 1: answer all those critiques. He was given equal time with

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Speaker 1: the other critics but since there were many of them

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Speaker 1: and only one of him, he had to scramble to

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Speaker 1: try to answer their points. Um so a lot of

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Speaker 1: Americans got the all over the world got the impression

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Speaker 1: that Belakowski had been refuted at that symposium, And Belokowski

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Speaker 1: has sort of become the the crackpots crack Pot, he's

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Speaker 1: the guy who's like Boldemort's. His name is never mentioned

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Speaker 1: by the scientists. Uh As they come up with new

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Speaker 1: discoveries that support Vilakowski, they'll make an announcement, like when

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Speaker 1: they discovered that the surface of Beatus actually was pristine,

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Speaker 1: they announced it. But side by side with that announcement

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Speaker 1: they came up with a second theory that whose purpose

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Speaker 1: or whose effect was to distance that's fine from Velakowski.

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Speaker 1: They said, well, clearly, geological forces we don't understand yet

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Speaker 1: must have globally resurfaced the planet. They've actually said that

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Speaker 1: with other other bodies out there too, that that it

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Speaker 1: looks to me as if um Pluto could be a

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Speaker 1: much younger body than we think, and that some of

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Speaker 1: the moons of the gas giants could be more recent

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Speaker 1: bodies than um the Earth is now. Was Venus, the

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Speaker 1: comet that got captured or is it the byproduct of

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Speaker 1: the collision with something in Jupiter. Well, the myths, ancient

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Speaker 1: Greek myths say that a goddess named Metis Um there

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Speaker 1: was a prophecy that you would have a child even

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Speaker 1: greater than Zeus, and so Zeus ended up swallowing Metis

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Speaker 1: and then gave birth to Venus. Venus was emerged from

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Speaker 1: the head of this is powas Athena um. Uh. We

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Speaker 1: shouldn't be confused with Athena the goddess um. And from

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Speaker 1: a scientific point of view, there was a study down

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Speaker 1: in China in two thousand and ten. They were trying

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Speaker 1: to explain why the core of Jupiter is intensely hotter

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Speaker 1: than theory predicts it should be, and also about half

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Speaker 1: the size that it should be. And they ran computer scenarios,

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Speaker 1: all sorts of different scenarios and decided that Um the

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Speaker 1: one that fit was that at some period in time,

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Speaker 1: a planet ten times the size of Earth um crashed

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Speaker 1: into Jupiter, sank to its core, and vaporized the core. Now,

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Speaker 1: astronomically speaking, Laird, what captured Venus in its orbit? Were

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Speaker 1: it's become now the second planet from the Sun. Well,

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Speaker 1: we can look at Um, we actually see evidence of

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Speaker 1: its happening. We have two of the stars of astronomy,

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Speaker 1: um Ptolemy, who lived in the early centuries around the

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Speaker 1: early centuries a d or just Uh. And then we

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Speaker 1: had a comp NICUs, who was like the father of astronomy.

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Speaker 1: And they both um independently of each other the hundreds

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Speaker 1: of years apart from each other, sat down and recorded

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Speaker 1: the times of visibility and invisibility of Venus as seen

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Speaker 1: from the Earth. And they also drew pictures of the

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Speaker 1: phases of Venus like the phases of the moon that

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Speaker 1: you can see, and drew them how they looked through

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Speaker 1: their telescopes. Now, the interesting thing is that what Ptolemy

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Speaker 1: produced doesn't agree with what we see today, which it should.

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Speaker 1: That venus orbit has always been like clockwork, we should

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Speaker 1: see the same thing he did. And Copernicus also doesn't

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Speaker 1: agree with us. But more importantly, the Copernicus doesn't agree

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Speaker 1: with Ptolemy. So they may have actually accidentally caught Venus's

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Speaker 1: orbit in transition um moving into a more circular orbit.

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Speaker 1: And isn't Venus slowing down right now? Yes? And that

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Speaker 1: that's also an indication there are forces acting on Venus,

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Speaker 1: we don't understand. There was a recent probe called Venus Express.

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Speaker 1: This was a European Space Agency probe that UM spent

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Speaker 1: a couple of years in orbit around Venus recording things

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Speaker 1: UM and when they compared those the measurements of venuses

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Speaker 1: or rotation with measurements that have been taken twelve years earlier,

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Speaker 1: they discovered that the rotation speed had slowed by six

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Speaker 1: and a half minutes over like sixteen year period span

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Speaker 1: of time. UM. So the very least we can say

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Speaker 1: from that is that we don't have a handle on

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Speaker 1: all the forces that are acting on Venus. So we're

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Speaker 1: not really in a position to say categorically that it

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Speaker 1: couldn't have its orbit, that couldn't have circularized in the

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Speaker 1: amount of time we have. And why is his theory

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Speaker 1: so controversial? I mean, even if he's right or wrong,

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Speaker 1: big deal. Why you attack the guy. I mean, it's

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Speaker 1: a it's a theory, it's a thought. Why is it

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Speaker 1: so controversial? Well, first of all, because of the visibility

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Speaker 1: he had. He was a highly visible because of the

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Speaker 1: relationship with Einstein and work he in Einstein had done

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Speaker 1: together in Europe and founding university in Israel. He was

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Speaker 1: a very visible UM author. People were going to pay

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Speaker 1: attention to what he had to say, and what he

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Speaker 1: was saying would have upset the traditional views of how

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Speaker 1: planets form. It would have meant that neither of the theories,

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Speaker 1: the leading theories for how planets form, was correct. What's

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Speaker 1: interesting is that in the the sixty some years since

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Speaker 1: UM he wrote UM, astronomers who studied the exo solar

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Speaker 1: system solar systems that are are outside of ours UM

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Speaker 1: have really come around the Belakowski's part of view. They

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Speaker 1: have actually embraced an official theory that is almost identical

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Speaker 1: to what Belakowski said. They say gas giants form in

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Speaker 1: the first ten million years of US stars life, and

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Speaker 1: that rocky planets form in the second ten million years

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Speaker 1: primarily as a result of collisions with a gas giant. Well,

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Speaker 1: that's precisely what Lakowski said, that a collision created Venus,

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Speaker 1: and collision with a gas giant Venus our Jupiter and

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Speaker 1: so UM. Of course, we understand that a collision can

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Speaker 1: theoretically happen anytime, and it doesn't have to happen billions

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Speaker 1: of years ago. It could happen tomorrow if the right

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Speaker 1: sized body were smash into a gas giant. Frank Strangers,

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Speaker 1: the researcher and author, years ago wrote a story about

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Speaker 1: someone coming from Venus called Valiant Thor, who literally came

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Speaker 1: to Venus, came from Venus to try to negotiate with

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Speaker 1: the Eisenhower administration and was rebuked. What do you think

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Speaker 1: of that? Well, back in the nineteen fifties, a lot

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Speaker 1: of scientists felt that Venus was going to be um habitable,

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Speaker 1: that we could go there and commonize it. They felt

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Speaker 1: that it was so much like the Earth. If Venus

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Speaker 1: really was billions of years old and was about the

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Speaker 1: same size, formed about the same time as the Earth,

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Speaker 1: and in about the same way that there's ought to

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Speaker 1: be a habitable planet. We get there and we discover

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Speaker 1: that the atmosphere on Venus is so close to what

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Speaker 1: the primordial atmosphere was like on Earth that climatologists say,

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Speaker 1: they say that they found a time machine. They can

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Speaker 1: look at what goes on on Venus and understand in

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Speaker 1: a better way what must have happened on the Earth.

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Speaker 1: So the climatologists also embraced the same point of views

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Speaker 1: as Venus, at least in the way they approach um

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Speaker 1: using that information. Listen to more Coast to Coast a m.

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Speaker 1: Every weeknight at one a m. Eastern, and go to

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Speaker 1: Coast to Coast am dot com for more