2012: Why ask NASA??

[D_Kissimmee Coldsore]

I got it wrong on the sunspot activity but i'm not a physicist after all.

And perhaps there is the answer to the thread title.

 

[Calboner]

Plaudits, Channelwood, for taking the trouble to offer some debunking of that Nostradamus crap. You do not, however, cite a source. Knowing the magician James Randi to have written an entire book on the subject (The Mask of Nostradamus), I Googled "James Randi Nostradamus" and was led to this page in the "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural" at the Web site of the James Randi Educational Foundation. It contains the same passage from Nostradamus and the same translation that you quote, as well as a detailed discussion.

The Nostradamus thing...the quatrain is vague as is all of them and nobody ever has been able to link any one of them to an event before it happens. This indeed could be because there is no link but his quatrains are uncanny when looking at the past (his future).

The fact that the quatrain we are talking about mentions London and 'blaze' and three twenty and six can be fitted to the Great Fire of London and the last line says that several from the same sect will be killed or die which can fit with the lynchings of dutch immigrants rumoured to be responsible for starting the fire shortly after the event. The third line however does not fit to anything. An anchient lady shall fall from height or something like that. The jury is out for me on Nostradamus until 2012 has past, if the quatrain about quakes is uncanny i will be less sceptical but if it passes without two significant quakes in LA and Italy then i will be more disbelieving.

Randi provides the contemporary historical circumstances to which the verses from Nostradamus are most plausibly construed to make reference:

[SIZE=+0]This quatrain actually refers to an event which was taking place as Nostradamus was penning his opus in 1555, but a very different event, and certainly not the Great Fire of London. Here are the historical facts:
1. Announcing a purge of her kingdom in 1554, the Catholic queen Bloody Mary I of England began executing Protestant heretics in London, beginning in January 1555. Many were prominent churchmen, intellectuals, and statesmen. One Bishop Ridley had an especially horrid exit from life. His brother-in-law, wishing to lessen his relative's suffering by hastening his death, had piled the faggots so high about him that the flames could not reach him, and the poor man cried out that he could not burn. His benefactor thereupon opened up the pile of wood, which more quickly brought an end to the bishop.

2. The trial, sentencing, and burning of these unfortunates began January 22, 1555, in groups of six. When they eventually expired at the stake, it was with an explosion like a thunderbolt, since they were burned with the “merciful” addition of bags of gunpowder tied between their legs or around their necks to quicken their passage.

3. Mary, haggard, totally obsessed with religion, disappointed in love, ill with dropsy and other assorted diseases, repeatedly imagined that she was pregnant by her husband Philip of Spain. The consort was seldom at home and in 1555 left England——and Mary——for good. She wandered about her palace half naked while the atrocities were being committed in her name. She died three years later, incoherent and considered quite insane. It was strongly suspected that her exit was hastened.

4. Over three hundred Protestants were executed in this way at that time.

When one considers these historical facts and compares them line for line and number for number with the four lines of the Nostradamus quatrain as seen in this much more accurate translation, a different view might be taken of the quatrain:[SIZE=+0]
1. The blood of the innocent will be an error at London,

2. Burned by thunderbolts, of twenty-three, the six(es),

3. The senile lady will lose her high position,

4. Many more of the same sect will be slain. [/SIZE]
[/SIZE]

(From "Encyclopedia of Claims, Frauds, and Hoaxes of the Occult and Supernatural.")

Nostradamus, and the various interpretations that have been put on his writings in order to simulate "proof" of their prophetic accuracy, have been debunked in every detail. I can't understand why you say, Mitchymo, that "the jury is out" as far as the bearing of his writings on 2012 is concerned. Given the fallacious strategies of interpretation that have been used, anything whatever that happens in the year 2012 can be shown post facto to have been anticipated by Nostradamus.

 

[mitchymo]

I can't understand why you say, Mitchymo, that "the jury is out" as far as the bearing of his writings on 2012 is concerned. Given the fallacious strategies of interpretation that have been used, anything whatever that happens in the year 2012 can be shown post facto to have been anticipated by Nostradamus.

Well i guess i just find it fascinating, i like mysterious things. I agree that the explanation you quoted sounds much more plausible than the Great Fire of London but then i had never heard that account of history before, i am interested in Nostradamus but i'm no fanatic so i hear what i hear and i make my own mind up. Many of his other quatrains have been founded to pertain to events that had happened before his time and during but some are intriguing because they mention things which do not seem to connect to anything. The quatrain about 'Hister' believed to mean Hitler for example, i don't know what historical person or place this may be and so the quatrain seems to fit only one known possibility. (To me at least as i've only ever seemed to read sceptical accounts and no derogatory ones)

I like to believe that humans are gifted with ability that is unbelievable, i would love for things like visions and telepathy to a part of the future....ok so i'm a little odd-ball.......that is Mitchymo in part.

EDIT:- the quatrain about the earthquakes is actually meant to be supposedly in either 2016 or 2044 so i've since learnt myself that somewher along the line 2012 has been plucked out of thin air! :redface: You live and learn! :smile:

 

[Calboner]

I like to believe that humans are gifted with ability that is unbelievable, i would love for things like visions and telepathy to a part of the future....ok so i'm a little odd-ball.......that is Mitchymo in part.

Well, you seem willing to give up a specific idea when presented with unanswerable evidence against it, and that's the important thing. I just think that you will find, if you continue to look into these matters, that the supposed evidence in favor of paranormal phenomena always turns out to have a far more probable explanation in terms of perfectly hum-drum causes. For instance, the James Randi Educational Foundation offers a prize of $1 million to "anyone who can show, under proper observing conditions, evidence of any paranormal, supernatural, or occult power or event." No applicant so far -- I think there have been thousands of them -- has passed the preliminary tests (the protocol of which is specified in advance).