ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how time’s entanglement with space fatally punctures an argument advanced by the fantasist Imanuel Velikovsky in his widely read Worlds in Collision. Velikovsky saw that the strange affair might provide support for his concept of worlds being recently in collision. For if Mars did, in fact, closely approach the earth in about 700 BC, as Velikovsky claimed, then perhaps its moons were clearly visible and the radii of their orbits, and their periods, might have been estimated. Velikovsky said that there is a 50% chance that Swift just made a lucky guess about the Martian moons. Kepler’s guesses which were correct for Mars but not for Saturn, Mercury or Venus, were based on his mystical belief in numbers and the importance of certain shapes of solids. Asaph Hall himself, discoverer of the Martian moons Phobos and Deimos, ‘the dogs of war’, suspected for another reason that Swift’s guess came via Kepler.
