COSMIC HERETICS: Part 5 :

by Alfred de Grazia

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

Actors in the dramas of science might learn certain precepts such as:

So writes Machiavelli in The Prince, which was posthumously published in 1532. He was speaking about politics but the generalization might be enlarged. Probably all who have had anything to do with creating a new science, or trying to do so, would agree with him. Included, even, would be those who could recognize tangible victories in their lifetimes -- Galileo, Newton, Hume, Darwin, Pasteur, Freud, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg.

The development of science, that is, sustains a branch of sociology: of historical psycho-politico-anthropo-sociology. When this is applied to science, as the science of science, a partial truth such as V.'s concept of collective fear being inherited from the trauma of ancient catastrophes takes its place as a modest useful contribution to the science of science. The more general truth is contained in Deg's model of the gestalt of creation where Homo Schizo emerges out of a catastrophized ambiance as the true and normal human, who invents science as a typically schizoid set of operations for inducing psychic control and uniting the psychic with control of the external world.

The science of science discloses in the history of the cosmic heretics the "inadequacies" of the American social system in dealing with the challenges of new science. There are three extensions, unhappily, of this remark. One is that the same types of "inadequacies" are characteristic of all areas of American science. The same kinds of "inadequacies" furthermore characterize all other branches of the American social system -- political, religious, economic, recreational, and educational. Third, the same kinds of "inadequacies" characterize all ethnic or national societies -- whether Western European or communist or "Third World."

I shall leave my readers to hunt by themselves for confirmation in the non-scientific areas of American life, whether by means of Deg's other works or the works of better teachers. I abandon them also to their own devices and explorations to discover what happens to new science in other nations. And I do little here to arrest their attention upon non-feasance and malfeasance in American society, other than by a few examples cited here and there, as by Burgstahler and Barber. I am tempted into one more example, this from a letter which Deg received from the most noted investigator of supersensory phenomena, Dr. J. B. Rhine.

In the late 70's Deg began using the term "quantavolution." Not only the increasing number of cosmic heretics, but also restless and probing scientists of the several large fields of geology, astronomy, biology, and the historical sciences had been publishing new materials in which global disasters figured, sometimes mentioning possible exoterrestrial causes, at other times remarking on the shortening of time scales implied in the new discoveries. In paleontology, Stephen Jay Gould, collaborating with Niles Eldredge, was promoting catastrophism in evolution and paleontology as processes of "punctuated equilibria," thus keeping to the fore the gradualist and incremental aspects of natural history and offending as few people as possible.

Deg knew he was on a right track with "quantavolution" when he read in Otto Schindewolf the new term "anastrophe" as opposed to "catastrophe" and found in it what he meant, for as Schindewolf had stated in 1961, "faunal discontinuities, as understood by us, involve not just the dying out of the old, but also the more or less sudden emergence of new phyla."

Later, Chicago's Field Museum of Natural History hosted a conclave of biologists called by Eldredge, an officer of the Museum, and Gould. Well-reported in Science, it did not precipitate an organized movements, even in the single field of paleontology. A different kind of advancement of science is occurring -- could it be the "partial incorporation of revolutions" that I spoke of earlier? In March of 1983, M. J. Benton of Oxford University wrote in Nature magazine on "large-scale replacements in the history of life," whereupon we must add "large-scale replacements" to our list of euphemism.

Nearly two centuries after Cuvier, thirty-three years (one Jeffersonian generation) after Schindewolf, 23 years after V. and even a couple of years after the laggard Deg, it is written that "there is increasing evidence that major physical changes caused more large-scale evolutionary changes than has competition," and that competition or natural selection "will rarely be the sole cause, whereas it could be postulated that a catastrophic change in the physical environment is sufficient on its own."

Warner Sizemore Richard Nixon and his henchmen were accused of covering up the Watergate Affair, their slogan was "stonewall it"; after a while the message was "we've got to bite the bullet."

Warner Sizemore was keen for influences from many fields and was aware of Deg's embracing the term "quantavolution." Deg writes to him:

Chesley Baity was trying to extend her great bibliographic labor in paleo-astronomy by incorporating catastrophism, working through conventional channels that she had persuaded to accept her so long as she did not push quantavolution.

Deg, I said, I can't use your letter from Dr. Chesley Baity; she won't let me. He said why did you ask her, dummkopf; you're talking about vital public issues; you're not titillating the crowd with private obscenities. It's a great letter: how she's been trying to get a seminar going on catastrophism at a school where ordinarily you're welcome to sell a course on every other known folly. She's forever asking my advice and then sweetly adding you don't mind if I don't mention your name. How many more years is she going to waste on this gambit?

I don't know, I said; she's afraid she'll lose the ground she's gained. A few more years and the ground she's gained will be six feet under, he said; and if she has to go, as we all do, at least there'll be her letter on record showing her as a heroine, a wily heretic who knows what she's after, and who knows how she's been led up the garden path by these deans, and university presses, and intolerant astronomers. It'll make sense out of all these years of running around telling people I'm not a heretic, you know, but then oughtn't we consider this and that cosmic disaster. Meanwhile they are laughing at her because she seems a befuddled southern lady, but they wouldn't if they really knew her as I do. The trouble with her is that her husband dominated her for so many years that she still hasn't recaptured the feisty womanhood she inherited from her old Texas stock. I must suggest she read that biography by Sayre of Rosalind Franklin and the British DNA caper.

Now this book of hers dealing with aspects of quantavolution; it's a good collection; good authors. Why is she wasting her years looking for a publisher for it. She can put it out; she's not broke. Did you tell her that, I asked. Yes, I did, and of course she said she wouldn't do any such thing. Another victim of the publishing myth. I said give a couple of thousands to a university press then; they'll publish it. Oh no I won't do that. Well, then, bury yourself and your authors. The publishers will shed no tears; they'll puff with pride for having kept a bad book off the market.

After he said this, I went and checked the list of contributors to Chesley's anthology of Civilization and Catastrophe. Of the thirty-six approximately half have not been mentioned by me in this book and about a fourth have escaped mention in Deg's Quantavolution Series. As you can see, a lot of "reaching out" occurs among the heretics, each in his own style, Chesley-Baity or, as here, Brian Moore is telling Deg of a new pair of cosmic heretics:

Professor Frank Dachille of Pennsylvania State University had long been a catastrophist in geology; he also was a reader of ancient literature; he piloted airplanes and had been building an airplane in his house at the time of his death in 1983. An acquaintanceship with Deg's work -- they met only by phone and letter -- led him into the reassessment of his own noteworthy work on meteoritics. A letter of July 29, 1979, shows Dachille engaging in the common quantavolutionary tasks of extending the logic of existing science and rereading ancient documents:

Some months after Dachille died, Deg suggested to the State University of Pennsylvania that a memorial meeting be held for him that would treat of subjects upon which he worked and that interested him: meteorites, explosion dynamics, catastrophism in ancient translations, etc. The suggestion caused surprise: Dachille was isolated among the some forty professors of geosciences; he was alone in his heresy, which the Chairman referred to charmingly as "extracurricular"; the Department of Astronomy seemed to be likewise uninterested; the name of V. foreshadowed unwelcome controversy; the campus was not near any large metropolitan center where an outside public would be attracted; besides, all the professors were remarkable people, said the Chairman. Yes, Deg agreed, and they were dying all the time.

In reviewing the debate over quantavolution and catastrophe over 30 years (for I see no reason to confine this statement to the twenty years of our scope here,) I am impressed by the flaccidity and ignorance of the opponents of the heretics more than by any other single phenomenon. Should full-fashioned quantavolution fall before the "truth," it would not be the effect of the opposition but rather of inadvertent blows and self-examination. The opposition has continually pressed the attack with ill-prepared Volksturm publicists parroting what scientists say, and then with infantry of the science who could only press buttons. The proud creative element of science, the Harrison Browns, Ureys, Neugebauers, Sagans and another score of top-notch scientists and humanists might be court-martialed for their failures, along with those who thought the U. S. Marines in Lebanon had such heavy firepower and such sophisticated gear that they were impregnable to assault and then were penetrated by the simplest of terrorist mechanisms and tactics. This was the "Vietnam Complex," too. Constantly misunderstanding the opposition; refusing to come to the conference table; seeking allies to help put down the guerrillas among publishers, foundations, universities; laying claim to working for the good of all -- are these actions not patent and repetitious on the record?

The opponents of quantavolution -- by focusing upon the person of Velikovsky; trying to convert a wide spectrum of interests on the part of hundreds of skilled, intelligent, and creative people into a cosmic strip; raising the spurious cry of "anti-science" just like the government raises the cry of "reds" and "enemies of democracy;" -- ended up heightening the public misunderstanding of science, aroused suspicion against themselves, attracted and promoted the most narrow and bigoted scientists and propagandists to the rank of spokesmen for science; Meanwhile, the humanists and social scientists let themselves be denounced for fools, anti-scientists, and mystics, and be accused of blocking flights to the Moon and wanting to steal jobs from the natural scientists.

The anti-heretics have paid no attention to the scores of heretics who have been building a case for quantavolution all these years. They have spoken of them contemptuously as a mad following that showed up to defend V. or to attack them, failing in every case that has come to my knowledge to read the literature of their opposition. Insofar as V. found it inconvenient to advance his own colleagues, he played directly into the hands of the opposition that was engaged in making of his work and mission a caricature. Allowing the issues that have emerged in the past decades of this controversy to be centered upon a caricature of Velikovsky is a way of continuously dampening the fires in the hope that they will die. The issues are much larger, and are important for the advancement of science.

Quite apart from Deg's voluminous work (and even if he had never written a line) there are available millions of words , at least thirty volumes of studies on aspects of quantavolution -- and I say nothing of the many distinguished predecessors of V., nor of the hundreds of studies passed as conventional science, that are gems of quantavolution. Nor have I mentioned the mutual teaching and learning going on among hundreds and thousands of students -- many of ripened age -- that cost their government and school systems and foundations nothing, and risked nobody's capital. Paying for itself, the movement practically registers as zero in the absurd artifice called the Gross National Product.

Files of correspondence and numerous tapes that I hold could be used to demonstrate the level of interaction among the heretics. As they exchange honorary degrees, the eagles of science invariably speak of the need for "interdisciplinary cooperation," of a "melding of the two worlds of science and the humanities." It is mostly pap. They never do it. They cannot do it. But the people they detest and call "anti-scientists" and the "lunatic fringe" do it as a matter of course. They do so because logically their interests and language are unspecialized, because they have slipped their intellectual anchors, and because they must talk to whoever happens to be passing by.

In Deg's files I find a brief article about a definition. I mention it to show a kind of particle that floats about unintegrated into a body of science. It is by Walter Federn, an Egyptologist, now deceased, who long ago assisted V. in his research. The piece would be almost unretrievable to an outsider for it appears in Zeitschrift fur Aegyptische Sprache und der Altertumskunde (33 Band 1966, 55-6). There he reproaches those who have retranslated the line "Forsooth, the land turns round as does a potter's wheel," which is from the Ipuwer papyrus, placed now by some scholars to the end of the Middle Kingdom and the Exodus (by those who follow V. 's chronology). Federn says they must not believe the words mean spinning normally in the same direction, but must mean being spun back and forth, as in testing the wheel, as clockwise then counterclockwise. So, Federn declares, the "point of comparison is the reversal of the social order into its very opposite." A great social upheaval is pictured. Or, possibly, I say, it means that the earth itself is gyrating: "The land reverses like a potter's wheel." It is highly probable that it was V.'s employment of Fedren that ultimately wafted this dry little piece to drift unintroduced and unexplained in the slow backwaters of scholarship.

The sociology of science should have field workers auditing conversations at meetings, making tape recordings, too, although Deg, for one, would be annoyed if I spoke of hidden recordings, of "goings-on," and would speak of invasions of privacy. But look you where the raw materials of a developing thought-pattern are to be found. I give you an instance where the sociologist of science should be.

Earl Milton was chairman of a symposium on planetary surfaces at McMaster University (Ontario) on June 17, 1974, with astronomer David Morrison, electrician Ralph Juergens and astrophysicist Derek York as speakers. Juergens assigned surface effects to recent transactions between Mars and the Moon. After the chairman called an intermission, the tape recorder was accidentally left spinning, and now a decade later we can eavesdrop upon several people, unknown to us, who spent the intermission by the speaker's table. The tape is not edited. The transcript I give here is partial. The voices are there, but they move so rapidly -- and so different are the voices in immediate hasty conversation -- and so impromptu the means of transmission and mechanisms employed -- and so inadequate the resources here for their study that the total episode cannot be captured; it is a soupHon of the full flavor. At issue is not a "lie" of President Nixon, which is worth millions, and which the nation's media will pay anything to capture, but merely a small truth that an isolated historian, me, is trying feebly to pick up. The balance of the accidental taping only adds to the impression, you have to believe, of an enthusiastic rapid mini-symposium, except that it ends with a new voice, obviously female, arranging to meet one of the voices at "a quarter to eight."

This goes on for a minute or two longer. The craters, rilles and mares of the Moon are discussed as if they might have been electromagnetically created. There are quickly disputed points and then we see a transition occurring from talking about the technology of electrical discharges (from the small crude personal experiment with a piece of wire to catastrophic avalanches of electricity between Moon and Mars). The voices move from the substance of science to the behavior. Let us reproduce this transition, which is important to a science of science.

The voices begin to discuss the "great red spot" of Jupiter, in relation to a newly discovered "red spot" on Venus... A New Voice claims the second discovery may be the umbilicus, where Venus spun off... Others exclaim Objections... Second Voice says Jupiter, great magnetic field would not let a body escape, nor would a body fly off the Red Spot which is not equatorial. New Voice says that there is no reason, only presumption, why Jupiter's field and axis would not have changed at the time of, or after the incident...

Second Voice:
But what of Venus' orbit....

New Voice:
That's different, too; Mars is responsible for it in part...

First Voice:
It may be so when we look at it from Velikovsky's perspective... The arguments against, built on the wrong inclinations and so forth, they are held by uniformitarian but they don't explain anything to a Velikovskyite you see...

Third Voice:
Of course, there is a built-in psychological problem. I don't know that it's uniformitarian but it's built into our Western logic...

Voices of Agreement... New

Voice:
If that's nature, we should find out. We should overcome that reaction. We've had our Copernicus, We've had our people who came along and said world is different from what everyone thinks. We've had ample evidence that this has happened -- not frequently -- but every five hundred years... And something of this.... and may be one of those times... So that's why I say, we ought to drop our resistance to the idea so much and say, well, holy smokes, you know, we've been confused by what we're doing uniformitarian-wise, let's jump over here and play for a while and see what happens, and that isn't the course that's followed, and I don't understand -- psychological resistance notwithstanding -- the unwillingness of a totally objective person to do that. You see, that's what bothers me.

Third Voice:
I think it's understandable....

I think if you consider, if you look at scientists and engineers, they spend years and years in universities buying their education and what you're suggesting is the education I've acquired... is so much garbage..

First Voice:
I don't find it garbage... It's not a waste... The data stand and the objectivity of these measurements stand. It is their interpretation of these problems....

New Voice:
You don't sacrifice your education when you change...

First Voice:
No, you don't, that's true... You don't have to throw the baby out with the bath.

All agree.
They speak of the strong psychological bent for orderliness in the scientific mind, "neat orderly chambers," dislike of uncertainty. "It's difficult to say I'm wrong!" "It's easy to say!" "It's very difficult to say!" "I've had so many years in graduate school. It was all bing, bing, bing, this is it..." Then later the very ideas and outlook changed.

Second Voice:
There are a great many scientists who would never come here to speak or even to listen, they wouldn't even discuss the questions... etc., etc.

What triggered the transition was a quickly perceived misstep or retrojecting Jupiter's behavior in a uniformitarian way. A second transition then occurs.

First Voice:
people are belongers, I belong to this group, you examine an eccentric hypothesis, then one gets into major trouble, your colleagues branding you a crackpot or idiot. New Voice: aren't we suffering from the two-culture problem?
Agreements.
"Velikovsky's cardinal points were in the humanities."

Yes New Voice:
"Yes, I think so,"

New Voice:
They were absolutely unquestioning...

And then

New Voice goes on to argue the factual validity of his proposition,
leaving the discussion of the logic of science and humanities behind and also the straight astrophysics and electromagnetics with which the talk began. The voices tend to agree in principle: that a consensus of widespread legends is persuasive as to its basic factuality. Now the voices thank each other and disperse, their few moments of exciting discussion ended.

I am afraid that I have lost you, my readers, amidst such a confusion of remarks, but I will regain you if I have merely shown you how the raw materials of this intense human discourse appear. Ultimately we reduce and clarify the process, introducing the logical order on a printed page but losing some of the intense give and take within the human mind and among different human minds.

Letters are not so important in scientific discourse as they once were, given the telephone, the Xeroxing machines, the airplane, and the comfortable meeting places to be found everywhere in colleges and hotels. They are more important among the heretics than among conventional scholars because they are the cheapest means of communication. Their effect is multiplied too by Xeroxing them and passing them around. But even then they are an unsatisfactory record, because they are rendered fragmentary by intervening telephone calls and meetings. Greenberg's and Lowery's correspondence in editing Kronos and the S. I. S. R. was heavy but would, especially in Greenberg's case, be enormous were it to include transcripts of the phone conversations.

Still, in letters one can follow the kind of internal argumentation that otherwise disappears. Thus Leroy Ellenberg, reconciled with Deg despite his mean attacks upon Chaos and Creation (mentioned earlier), began to use Deg as a postal drop, sending him letters, copies of letters and articles, and memoranda. By 1983 Ellenberger was preparing to abandon much of quantavolution and found now that the story of Velikovsky was not without its shady tones, and more important, that Arctic ice cores and bristlecone pine dating technologies were directly contradicting Holocene quantavolutions by their even pattern of annual regression into time; further, that Gentry's studies of the surprising "instant" polonium halos of creation that came from nowhere -- parentless -- and which threatened the theory of radiochronometry, were probably invalid. You show a total misunderstanding of the Oxygen-18 isotope technique of measuring time in ice varves, he assured Deg, as The Burning of Troy with its critique of ice core studies was about to appear.

It seemed that Leroy was on the verge of taking up a macrochronist position in quantavolution, which by 1983 was fast emerging from geophysics and paleontology and which offered respectability to its clientele. One could thereupon dismiss all apparent human experience with catastrophe and get rid of the historical sciences and humanities.

Deg contemplated the prospect sourly. I could, he thought, surrender michrochronism in the event of defeat, but I would rather relabel the total construction as a heuristic exercise machine, good for the circulation of the blood and the sharpening of the critical faculties.

There were always these honest, upsetting or encouraging, epistolary discussions going on among the heretics, many of them -- how many? -- a score at a time. Here is another one from 1978, going into 1979. The cosmic heretic, Dwardu Cardona of Vancouver, is writing to the cosmic heretic, Irving Wolfe of Montreal:

This goes on for several pages, one of several letters in the interchange going to show how much of human history and science evolves around the figure of Saturn, the great god of the Neolithic Age and beyond, everywhere in the world.

I will not print Wolfe's reply, equally lengthy, also giving and taking. He has published obscurely (save to cosmic heretics) several articles on the catastrophic imagery of Shakespeare, that when published in book form (he collected a number of rejections) will constitute a formidable body of analysis on Shakespeare, by a new approach.

But then Cardona is also busy with historical astrophysics, and he perceives in Deg's ideas a competitor to his own. Never mind, he has his reasons, and he writes to Earl Milton:

And Milton replies:

And Cardona writes:

And so on. Cardona has several sympathizers and is seeking to convert Milton and Deg, who in turn are moving rapidly on their own model. Cardona, meanwhile, begins to publish his rich Saturn materials in Kronos. Clube and Napier come forth with a cometary model, derived without contact with any of them, in Cosmic Serpent, practically simultaneously with Chaos and Creation.

A process is here occurring that resembles somewhat the internal competition among the Cambridge, London and California biologists striving to produce the first and most useful model of the structure of DNA, an event of 1953 described by Watson in The Double Helix. By 1984 there were in contention the Cardona-Talbott Saturn model, the Clube-Napier galactic cometary model, and the De Grazia-Milton Solaria Binaria model of cosmic quantavolution. All of these were far ahead of, or let us say distinct from the heavy empirical work beginning to appear concerning meteoritic impacts, clay chemistry, and biological extinctions. Perhaps the tides of particular studies will wash away most of the substance of the models. Such a fate has befallen the model of the victorious biological team, as Stephen Jay Gould tells us:

And Gould, whom we have come to perceive as a quantavolutionist, can even discover in this movement from the one model to the other a victory for "repaid and profound rearrangement" over the "implication that evolution proceeds slowly and gradually." Pleased as we may be about this aspect of the change, we are here more directly made aware of the possible short life of even the best of scientific and cosmogonic models.

Once more I return to the point that almost nothing of the large number of writings in scientific support of or in modification of quantavolution, particularly as conveyed in V.'s work, has been read by any conventional scholar, including (I stress) those who claimed to have read something by V. prior to attacking him. It is clear that one way of treating with heretics is to go on the principle "Smite the shepherd, and the flock will be scattered." Moreover, anti-heretics lose much of their effectiveness as soon as they discuss work by heretics other than Velikovsky, because they depend so heavily upon a prior inoculation of the public of science with stereotypes against his name.

In this regard, the heretics have suffered by their own behavior. If they must constantly acclaim V. on their first page, like others do Einstein, Marx or Engels, and Freud, it's like prefacing every encounter with a "Heil Hitler" at the worst, or at its mildest, forever snapping salutes between the military, a practice devised to confirm a status system, limit originality, and exclude an outer world.

It must be apparent by now that V. was not without blame. He did not want even one, much less two or a group of martyrs burning alongside him at the stake. He was loath to adopt the ideas or quote or put forward or support anyone who was about to be credited or discredited by a valid contribution that was not a priori a confirming footnote to his own work. The idea of a roundtable or true seminar was beyond him. After decades in America he became a citizen, but he had always some of the czarism and mosaism of old Russia that would not let one kick ideas around like soccer balls.

V.'s prominence absorbed all energies penetrating from outside in addressing him and his claims, diverting attention from all other new work in the field, which was in any event dammed up and had to trickle through his notoriety, whether in magazines of general circulation or in the couple of small magazines, which themselves held back most work not directly concerned with his affairs.

Were I to guess the quantity of useful writing appearing as deliberately directed toward quantavolution, I would suggest a statistical figure approaching a Fibonacci series by dodecennial periods, beginning in 1940-1951 at 1000 pages; thus, 2000 pages for 1952-63; 3000 pages for 1964-75; 5000 pages for 1976-87; 8000 pages for 1988-1999; 13,000 pages for 2000-2011; and so on in time, granted there would be no world war or political revolution.

My aim, in quoting heretical correspondence in this chapter at some length (still not one-hundredth of its volume), has been to give evidence of how science proceeds among heretics and non-heretics alike. The published work (which in the case of the heretics has not been read by the non-heretics) is only the tip of the iceberg showing. The same is true in most scientific work. There must be a consensus of sorts between correspondents else they cannot talk: here, with Wolfe, Cardona shares the belief that literature connects with a mainstream of mythology extending to the birth of the human mind; with Milton, (and with Wolfe, too) Cardona shares the premise, arrived at on both sides at the end of years of study, that the planets have moved and changed, even in early human times

The behavior of the cosmic heretics corresponds closely to that of conventional scholars in regard to their methods of work, and would be practically indistinguishable were it not for the warping of the processes brought on by the heretics' poverty of resources. Back and forth, the shaping form of new kind of science (like the old) works like a complicated weaving machine, capable of darting up and down and sidewise to pluck its threads, strengthen its seams, and sometimes the machine sticks and threads must be pulled out, sometimes a whole line of thread as some major patterning element has to be rejected.

In the 1960's the American Psychological Association, through W. D. Garvey and B. C. Griffith, conducted pioneering studies of the communication network of the field with which some 30,000 persons were connected. Of these 30,000, 2000 or less provided almost all the materials that were being circulated as current psychology.

Work published in a psychological journal started on the average 30 to 36 months before publication. Between 18 and 20 months before publication the work was shaped to a point where it might be reported. Usually, between 15 and 18 months before publication, the reporting process began. Initial communications were highly informal and occurred typically at the writer's institution. After several months a formal report was prepared that in about 30% of the cases came to be delivered at a national or regional meeting. Almost always the audience was below 100, sometimes only a dozen. Copies become available at the Convention, and special papers might be distributed now also by the author (s) through their sponsors such as a government agency. Preprints were usually distributed, between 10 and 200. These were often given to close-in co-workers, acquaintances elsewhere, and persons who had heard about the work and asked for copies. The interval between submissions and publication ordinarily took 9 months or more, but the interval would be doubled if an article were rejected. Few articles failed to gain acceptance somewhere else. While the publishing proceeded, additional reports were being made to groups and classes. Aside from textbooks, which amount to compulsory subsidizing by students, practically all scientific (and scholarly), publishing is subsidized by scientists as individuals or groups, directly or through tax money whose appropriation and spending they manage to influence.

Exposure of the work by publication is low. The largest journal reaches 30% of the general population of psychologists; specialized psychology journals may reach 1%. The largest journal will expose the title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be expose the title to all; however, one half of the research reports will be read by 1% or less of the readership, none by more than 7%, it appears. Half the articles in the largest journals are read by only some 200 readers. Current journal reading amounts to only about one-third of the journal reading of one group of active psychologist studied. Some months later an article becomes retrievable by being indexed in one of the now well-equipped services such as Psychological Abstracts, thus helping people like Deg, who was trying to find out what work was going on regarding "human nature," only to find nothing because the term was not indexed. The Garvey-Griffith study offered proof of what disciplinary leaders know everywhere, that long before the rank and file, and quite long before the public, learns of a new line of research, the leaders know it from personal acquaintanceship, membership on foundation and government boards, and operating at the nodes of communication where manuscripts come in and criss-cross and where money changes hands.

The same process that occurs in psychology occurs on a greatly reduced scale in quantavolution, among the heretical community. The scientific creationists too are loosely organized and operate, also in a small way, like the psychologists. They and the scientific heretics engage in mutual eavesdropping. A somewhat different process occurs among the non-heretical quantavolutionaries, who operate on the fringes of their discipline -- psychology, biology, astronomy, anthropology, etc., and are signaled by terms such as "macroevolution," "punctuated equilibria," and so forth. These for the most part are anti-heretical and cling to their disciplinary centers as much as possible. Thus Walter Alvarez, who is himself under fire for a study showing the "iridium layer" marking an end to the dinosaurs in the rock strata is prompt to refer to Deg's work as "anti-scientific." He cannot have read Deg's work or any other considerable literature of the field; otherwise he must be using some narrow and antiquated definition of science, or worse, using the term science for name-calling.

It is widely believed that all astronomers, all geologists, all physicist, all historians, and all archaeologists have for thirty years been close-minded to the arguments continually brought up by the cosmic heretics. This is not so. And this stereotype of the resistant and rigid collective mind continually exacerbated feelings on both sides. (As did the opposite stereotype, that all heretics were foolish and anti-scientific.) To illustrate my point I will turn to Deg again, for he was always concocting hypothetical statistics. (He should have offered a college course on the subject; it is useful for those areas, most areas, where data is trivial or scanty, and the usual resort is to revert to the Aristotelian modes of thought.)

Deg was here counting as scientists those humanists and social scientists who profess a scientific approach to their fields. He knew of none of these of the top elite who had studied deeply the literature. Probably no more than 1000 persons in the world have been seriously engaged in the discovery and study of quantavolutionary literature over the past thirty years. If Velikovsky's Worlds in Collision has been read by a million people, most of the thousand will have read the book, but 99% of the million readers will have read little else of value besides it.

Many a well-known figure of science has had an exoterrestrial skeleton in his closet. Plato would deny the citizenry the right to challenge the divine and natural order of the heavens and proposed severe penalties for such. Yet Plato has for over 2000 years afforded support to quantavolutionists in history (the Atlantis report), astronomy (deviations of the planets) and geology (destruction of early Attica by earthquakes), V. was annoyed when Stecchini stressed the anti-quantavolutionist side of Plato's political writings, and urged upon them a consistency that was not there; at least it seemed to Deg that he could not tolerate a double standard for Plato, that what was true should nevertheless be suppressed for the good of the social order. Here was an example of what was forbidden in principle to a psychoanalyst: V. therefore needed to believe that the truth would free man and wished a social policy that would acknowledge ancient traumas of catastrophe so as psychologically to free him in his behavior today. Given V. 's authoritarian bent, a contradiction of feelings arose which was displaced upon Stecchini's innocent and free-wheeling skepticism and attacked unreasonably. It does appear that Plato was deliberately contradictory. He recognized a chaotic universe while officially forbidding its recognition.

Stecchini performed a similar service with respect to Newton and Laplace, discovering in both men the inklings of catastrophism. In Newton's case the contradiction between a stable order of the skies of the new science and a biblical literalism ordaining catastrophic belief was explicit, but glossed over by Newtonian science. Stecchini's exposure of the concern of Laplace that destructive cometary visitations were possible, and of his admission that his mathematics, which fixed the modern vision of an impeccable celestial order, simplified reality, was more surprising.

Deg met with additional surprises and came to suspect that when the time came to throw off the uniformitarian guise, scientists would rediscover a general exceptionalism and anomalism in geology, paleontology, evolution, and astronomy. He relocated persons such as Pickering and Wegener. He found that Shapely, who had become the anti-hero of the Velikovskian sociological scenario, had posited exoterrestrial encounters one time, and so, too, Harry Hess, who had filed amicus curiae briefs for Velikovsky, and Sagan to whose burst of fame both hypotheses of exoterrestrial communication and rebuttals of Velikovsky contributed.

Some of such characters found a place in the geology of Deg's Lately Tortured Earth. Together with the frankly catastrophic writers, such as Melvin Cook and Allan Kelly, they would come to play an important substantiating role, like the dissenting minority opinions in U. S. Supreme Court history, when the moment for revising science would occur. Then some of those who had denounced "backward catastrophism" would become forerunners of quantavolution.

But, please note, I have scarcely touched upon the full breadth of the science of science, which would embrace the thousands of cases occurring in the normal operations of conventional science upon conventional offerings to science. Nor can I do so, for I must be done with the case of the cosmic heretics very soon now.

V. realized these dangers, and coined the idea of' collective amnesia with the purpose of exposing this mentality and thus controlling it, while Deg too realized the danger in the association and went further to explicate the original dynamics of Homo Schizo, to build peace institutions, and to devise peace therapies.