Technical answers for Velikovsky fanstasy

Velikovsky's books aren't online, but some of this smaller works are, at The Immanuel Velikovsky Archive. Once, in an online discusssion with a Velikovskian, he recommended COSMOS WITHOUT GRAVITATION as an example of the scientific rigor and vast knowledge that Velikovsky brought to the table. Read it for yourself ... it's a truly incredible document. And some people think that's scientific rigor and vast knowledge!

It's difficult to make detailed predictions without some idea of the proposed mechanism of stopping the Earth (and re-starting it) and the time frame over which it is hypothesized to have hapened. But …The Earth has a moment of inertia I (= 2*M*R²/5) of about 10³⁸ kg-m². It rotates at about ω = 7.3*10^-5 radians/sec. The energy of this rotation is (Iω²)/2, or about 3*10²⁹ joules. For comparison, the Hiroshima bomb was about 8.4*10¹³ joules, so the Earth's energy of rotation is 3,000,000,000,000,000 Hiroshima bombs. Or, the world's entire nuclear arsenal at its maximum was about 10,000 megatons or about 6.5*10¹⁹ joles, so the Earth's energy of rotation is about 400,000,000 times the nuclear arsenal. Or yet another comparison; the dinosaur-killer impact at Chicxulub is estimated at about 10²³ joules, or the Earth's rotational energy is about 3,000,000 of those impacts! This energy has to go somewhere (and be restored) with almost perfect efficiency (none of it wasted as heat) or the Earth is fried big time. Even if a tenth of a percent goes to heat, we're all dead hundreds of times over.Of course, whatever magical force does this has to act equally on all the Earth, even the air and underground parts, or we get things like all the stalactites and stalagmites in existence lying broken on cave floors and thousand-mile-per-hour winds.Basically, the idea is so ludicrous that it's difficult to treat it rationally.

Yeah, I remember now. Gravity or electrostatics wouldn't be able to apply the required force, so it must have been a physical collision. If it was a physical collision the Earth would have been destroyed by the sudden release of such energy in a short time.If someone wants to postulate gravitational mass sufficient to do the job, or an electric field (on both planets) strong enough to do the job, then the tidal effects woudl have ripped the Earth apart, and the energy released through inefficiency would have melted the sucker. See my calculations above; that's a lot of energy.