Carl Sagan & Immanuel Velikovsky (snip)
Book announcement
Preface
Dr. Carl Sagan, a professor of astronomy from Cornell University, a well known public personality and writer of popular books of science, in 1974 at a symposium of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) delivered a paper, "An Analysis of Worlds in Collision". This paper was later edited and presented in a book, Scientists Confront Velikovsky, published by Cornell University Press. The paper was further edited and presented in Sagan's book Broca's Brain, under the title "Venus and Dr. Velikovsky". Sagan's paper is a critique of Immanuel Velikovsky's book Worlds in Collision.
Having read Velikovsky, I also read Sagan's paper; I thereafter discovered that a group of scientists and scholars had written critiques of Sagan's analysis. After reading these criticisms I began a search of the literature and over a period of time I became convinced that Sagan's critique lacked substance. Most surprising was the number of statements made by Sagan that proved to be clearly untrue. Further reading reinforced this discovery of the glaringly unscientific and unscholarly quality of Sagan's paper. What was much worse, was that it was difficult to imagine that even Sagan was unaware of the misrepresentation of evidence presented as scholarly criticism by him and offered to the public...
http://www.velikovskian.com/sagan.htm
Good lookin' out (jargon ;'). Even in the mid-1970s, the idea of the so-called greenhouse effect on Venus (which was suggested long before Sagan, when the cloud top temps were first measured using radar observations, before the space age) was rejected because the Venusian atmosphere is opaque to the sun's rays, such that the surface glow detected by the Venera probes is not due to solar rays -- they don't reach the surface.
My favorite title from those two KRONOS special issues is C.J. Ransom's "Sagan's Appendices: A Quick Appendectomy".