Wednesday 29 June 2011

The Archdruid is right!

This may not surprise many people - least of all the Archdruid - but after a long discussion with Young Keith, I've come to the definite conclusion that she's entirely right with her prediction of the End.  2033 +/- 5 years she said.  Well, I can tell you the exact time (well, Young Keith can): it's going to be 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, 19th January 2038.  It's all to do with unsigned 32-bit integers, which are very dangerous things, particularly when you run out of them and they overflow.  Believe me (or Young Keith, anyway) - you really don't want that happening.

I know some will question whether we can know the exact time.  Well, given that the Bible is consonant with scientific fact (if you read it right, anyway, ignoring the bits that are difficult, or at least re-translating them more carefully this time, or explaining that they are just myths that represent the world-view of pre-Enlightenment peoples of the Middle and Near East to the best of their understanding within the limits of a pre-knowledge based social collective consiousness - which I know we can all agree on, except maybe Drayton), then I think should realise that the bit about "not knowing the time" is actually a simplified statement of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.  In other words, we can't know with arbitrary precision the exact position and the exact momentum of the End Time.  Given that we can work out the exact position of the Earth at that particular time, based on Newtonian Dynamics with a bit of Einsteinian relativity thrown in, then we just can't be sure of the momentum.  I'm pretty sure that's what I agreed with Young Keith, but we were at the White Horse at the time, and we'd been sitting chatting over a few pints, so it might have been the other way round.

2 comments :

  1. So you're saying we can know the hour or the day, but not the hour and the day?

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  2. Andromeda is definitely on its way so you could say we all have a hard stop in a couple of million years, that is if the sun doesn't turn into a red dwarf before that. In the light of such cosmic imponderables maybe it would be better if we all focused on the here and now?

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