[Physicist]

Every century has its "medved".

[I Hired Craig Livingstone]

Every century has its "medved".

And an "f.Christian" to provide the documentation. : )

[Gumlegs]

Velikovsky via Von Daniken, perhaps?

For those who've been following the Medved story here at FR, I found this report of a debate with Velikovsky himself. Do we notice any similarities in debating techniques between our own beloved Medved and Velikovsky himself?

This is an excerpt from a letter from someone who actually debated Velikovsky. It's printed in the current issue of Skeptic Magazine, and the author notes that a more complete report of the event is printed in At The Fringes of Science. It's signed, "Michael Friedlander, Department of Physics, Washington University, St. Louis, MO.

In my presentation, I gave examples of Velikovsky's distortion of the published scientific literature in quotations that he used to support his theses. For example, he quoted Lyttleton as writing that "the terrestrial planets, Venus included, must have originated from the giant planets ... " Lyttleton did not use the word "must." In another case, Velikovsky cited thermoluminescence studies of Apollo 12 lunar cores, reporting that "disturbances were of a thermal nature." Those measurements were made by some of my colleagues, and Velikovsky's description is, at best, imaginative.

When I gave each example, his response was "Where did I write that?"; when I showed a photo copy of the quoted pages, he simply switched to a different topic.

Of course, we cannot discount the possibility that Friedlander's slavish devotion to the Physics Cult has blinded him to the truth of Velikovsky's quoting techniques. Forced to chose, I'd go with an f-stop of 5.6.