daver and Avian--

Aristotle seems to have dropped the ball, though I must say having read him a while back and thinking about what he had to work with, I'd not be so hard on the guy. After all, the concept of crystal spheres is no weirder than some. But yes, he based his cosmology on a set of first principles that he worked from. On the moon, um, nobody said it was free of blemishes, but that it was free of flaws -- there is a difference that makes sense to a philosopher. Aristotle had no reason to think the moon was made of anything like the Earth. After all, solid objects don't float on their own.

Velikovsky -- hmmm. I read parts of his original book years ago. Any one piece of it seems plausible enough, given what was known in the 30s. It was when the data didn't support his hypothesis as well as others that things start to come apart for him, as well as his misreadings of ancient myths. So I'd say after the first spectrographs of Venus came back, and the first radiographic temperature measurements, he would have had to give his theory a rethink. He didn't. It is after reading "Carl Sagan and Immanuel Velikovsky" -- a defense of the latter, that's when I'd place the big V in the Bad Astronomy camp. That book was written much later on.

Am I nuts?

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