Nebula Papers

  Cosmic Catastrophism: Balancing Orbital Mechanics, Angular Momentum, and Velikovsky’s Radical Theory of Ancient Planetary Near-Collisions Immanuel Velikovsky is one of those intellectual firecrackers you can’t unsee once you’ve encountered him. A trained psychiatrist who wandered into ancient texts, comparative mythology, and then — without asking permission — into celestial mechanics, he argued (most famously in Worlds in Collision ) that planets like Venus and Mars passed dangerously close to Earth in historical times, triggering global catastrophes remembered as plagues, floods, “the sun standing still,” and assorted civilizational nightmares. To be clear: modern astronomy does not accept Velikovsky’s planetary flyby scenario as a literal account of what happened in the last few thousand years. But the question his work keeps poking — almost like a persistent thumb on a bruise — is still interesting: If something planet-scale passed close to Earth, could that happen without...