Although medical doctor and psychiatrist Immanuel Velikovsky buttressed his theory of the origin of Venus with a wide range of evidence, beginning with his book Worlds in Collision (1950), planetary scientists vehemently rejected his arguments and claims. For decades critics attacked Velikovsky’s idea, for instance that Venus emerged as a comet from Jupiter, then approached Earth during the Bronze Age, causing catastrophes that appeared in the Bible and other ancient accounts and myths as well as evidence in geology, archaeology, linguistics, and calendrics. Though Velikovsky attracted a following, he was shut out of scientific journals and became the single most vilified scientist of all time. After his death in 1979, the controversy–the greatest in planetary science since Copernicus and Galileo–faded into the background. But gradually researchers accumulated an array of new evidence supporting his case. Yet the case remains in limbo.
Now a chatbot, Claude Haiku, has revisited the case and asked whether it shows signs of scientific rejectionism. When we figure out how to present its findings, we will!