39 Facts About Immanuel Velikovsky

Immanuel Velikovsky is the author of several books offering pseudohistorical interpretations of ancient history, including the US bestseller Worlds in Collision published in 1950.

Immanuel Velikovsky proposed a revised chronology for ancient Egypt, Greece, Israel, and other cultures of the ancient Near East.

In general, Immanuel Velikovsky's theories have been ignored or vigorously rejected by the academic community.

Immanuel Velikovsky was born in 1895 to a prosperous Lithuanian Jewish family in Vitebsk, Russia.

Immanuel Velikovsky then traveled in Europe and visited Palestine before briefly studying medicine at Montpellier in France and taking premedical courses at the University of Edinburgh.

Immanuel Velikovsky returned to Russia before the outbreak of World War I, enrolled in the University of Moscow, and received a medical degree in 1921.

Immanuel Velikovsky enlisted Albert Einstein to prepare the volume dealing with mathematics and physics.

Immanuel Velikovsky lived in what was then the British Mandate of Palestine from 1924 to 1939, practising medicine in the fields of general practice, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis which he had studied under Sigmund Freud's pupil Wilhelm Stekel in Vienna.

Immanuel Velikovsky was published in Freud's Imago, including a precocious analysis of Freud's own dreams.

In 1939, with the prospect of war looming, Immanuel Velikovsky travelled with his family to New York City, intending to spend a sabbatical year researching for his book Oedipus and Akhenaton.

Immanuel Velikovsky privately published two small Scripta Academica pamphlets summarising his theories in 1945.

Immanuel Velikovsky mailed copies of the latter to academic libraries and scientists, including Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley in 1947.

In 1952, Doubleday published the first installment in Immanuel Velikovsky's revised chronology, Ages in Chaos, followed by the Earth in Upheaval in 1955.

In November 1952, Immanuel Velikovsky moved from Manhattan to Princeton, New Jersey.

For most of the 1950s and early 1960s, Immanuel Velikovsky was persona non grata on college and university campuses.

Immanuel Velikovsky lectured, frequently to record crowds, at universities across North America.

In 1920s and 1930s, Immanuel Velikovsky published his concepts in medical and psychoanalytic journals.

Immanuel Velikovsky is best known for research performed in 1940s when living in New York City.

Rather than have his ideas dismissed wholesale because of potential flaws in any one area, Immanuel Velikovsky then chose to publish them as a series of book volumes, aimed at a lay audience, dealing separately with his proposals on ancient history, and with areas more relevant to the physical sciences.

Immanuel Velikovsky was a passionate Zionist, and this did steer the focus of his work, although its scope was considerably more far-reaching than this.

The entire body of work could be said to stem from an attempt to solve the following problem: that to Immanuel Velikovsky there appeared to be insufficient correlation in the written or archaeological records between Biblical history and what was known of the history of the area, in particular, Egypt.

Immanuel Velikovsky searched for common mention of events within literary records, and in the Ipuwer Papyrus he believed he had found a contemporary Egyptian account of the Plagues of Egypt.

Immanuel Velikovsky attempted to investigate the physical cause of these events, and extrapolated backwards and forwards in history from this point, cross-comparing written and mythical records from cultures on every inhabited continent, using them to attempt synchronisms of the historical records, yielding what he believed to be further periodic natural catastrophes that can be global in scale.

Immanuel Velikovsky arrived at a body of radical inter-disciplinary ideas, which might be summarised as:.

Cosmos without Gravitation, which Immanuel Velikovsky placed in university libraries and sent to scientists, is a probable catalyst for the hostile response of astronomers and physicists to his later claims about astronomy.

Immanuel Velikovsky argued that the conventional chronology of the Near East and classical world, based upon Egyptian Sothic dating and the king lists of Manetho, was wholly flawed.

Immanuel Velikovsky shifted several chronologies and dynasties from the Egyptian Old Kingdom to Ptolemaic times by centuries, placing The Exodus contemporary with the fall of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.

Immanuel Velikovsky proposed numerous other synchronisms stretching up to the time of Alexander the Great.

Immanuel Velikovsky argued that these eliminate phantom "Dark Ages", and vindicate the biblical accounts of history and those recorded by Herodotus.

The Skeptical Inquirer, in a review of a later book by de Grazia, Cosmic Heretics, suggests that de Grazia's efforts may be responsible for Immanuel Velikovsky's continuing notability during the 1970s.

The Institute for the Study of Interdisciplinary Sciences is a 1985 spinoff from the SIS founded under the directorship of David Rohl, who had come to reject Immanuel Velikovsky's Revised Chronology in favour of his own "New Chronology".

Ten issues of Pensee: Immanuel Velikovsky Reconsidered appeared from 1972 to 1975.

The controversy surrounding Velikovsky peaked in the mid-1970s and public interest declined in the 1980s and, by 1984, erstwhile Velikovskyist C Leroy Ellenberger had become a vocal critic of Velikovskian catastrophism.

Immanuel Velikovsky's ideas have been rejected by mainstream academia and his work is generally regarded as erroneous in all its detailed conclusions.

Immanuel Velikovsky would rebuild the science of celestial mechanics to save the literal accuracy of ancient legends.

Immanuel Velikovsky's bestselling, and as a consequence most criticized, book is Worlds in Collision.

Immanuel Velikovsky's criticisms are available in Scientists Confront Velikovsky and as a corrected and revised version in the book Broca's Brain: Reflections on the Romance of Science.

Immanuel Velikovsky's revised chronology has been rejected by nearly all mainstream historians and Egyptologists.

Immanuel Velikovsky claimed that this made him a "suppressed genius", and he likened himself to the 16th century heretical friar Giordano Bruno, who was burnt at the stake for his beliefs.