Richard Stern: Cosmic Heretics, by Alfred de Grazia
Heretics from the doctrines of modern science have been legion, but scattered. Those here catagorized as "cosmic" include a diverse group of researchers, originally inspired by Immanuel Velikovsky's theories of the cosmos and history, who are convinced that the planets in our solar system have moved and changed within the memory of the human species and even within historical times. Such exo-terrestrial movements, denied by the scientific establishment, have profoundly and often catastrophically impacted every aspect of life on Earth.
But this is not a book about cosmogony, or even catastrophism per se, although it touches upon a vast body of multidisciplinary research by original thinkers and mavericks from mathematics to mythology, phylogeny to physics, genetics to geology, literature, language, anthropology, and psychology. Velikovsky himself was a psychoanalyst and architect with the temerity to challenge some widely accepted theories apparently unrelated to his fields of specialization. For this, he was pilloried with paranoid attacks from the scientific academic aristocracy.
Cosmic Heretics is part of the autobiography of one of these mavericks, who first defended Velikovsky's academic respectability and then coordinated a wave of research into various hypotheses often summarily dismissed or zealously attacked as "unscientific". De Grazia, too, has made a brilliant career of invading fields other than "his own". The easy-flowing, intentionally "schizoid" style of this book alternates the narration between the "I" and the "he", including intermittent dialogue between them, to exemplify the "poly-ego" inherent in each of us.
Alfred de Grazia, Richard Stern, June 2012
The "recent" pre-historic and historical planetary changes, according to De Grazia, have imprinted upon the human mind a multiple personality in our divided brain. Our collective consciousness is affllicted with severe post-traumatic stress syndrome, which keeps in place so many of our denials and contradictions. Those sky-Gods were real and omnipotent to our hominid and homo sapiens ancestors. At times they were terrible and terrifying, touching and transforming the very geology and physics of the planet, metamorphozing the very neurology and psyche of living organisms.
But the author deals elsewhere, in an encyclopedic body of research, with "quantavolutionary" science. Here he tells of his involvement in the politics of research. He analyzes and criticizes the methods of manipulating academic and popular perceptions by the scientific coterie who manage the media, who market themselves to protect and magnify their successes, and whose lobby has the power to recognize or refute deviations from the "uniformitarian" or to grant or deny research funds and professional positions. This book is a personal story of decades of the author's dealing with friends and foes of radical research regarding cosmic events and the human mind. It both entertains and prods us to re-ignite the scepticism so essential to the method defined as scientific.
Richard Stern
Published January 2013 - 414 pages; 6"x9"; ISBN: 978-1-60377-084-2 LCCN: 2012921083 - Metron Publications, Princeton, NJ, USA.
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