Mayan predictions

arildno

I strongly suspect that the so-called amazing accuracy of the Mayan calendar is just the collective fantasy of a coterie of math-blind archaeologists.

Chronos

Wooeologists painting bullseyes around the darts would be my guess. 'A bad thing involving fire may someday happen' is not a convincing example of prophesy. Vaguity is the bread and butter of all soothayers. Toss in a few bizarre, and equally vague images, and you have . . . magic. Give me something useful, like tomorrow's powerball numbers. It seems the prophets always complain 'the spirits do not permit such 'knowledge'. Indeed, the 'spirits' appear unable to impart any testable predictions of the future. James Randi anyone?

Ivan Seeking

I don't think the Mayans had powerball.

The interesting thing is that even if a "prediction" is accurate, we can never know if it was coincidence. If a "psychic" gave you tomorrow's powerball numbers, it would be attributed to chance.

How many powerball winners claim to be psychic? Does anyone have any idea? If there were many very rich psychic people - people who are able to do better than the odds would suggest - would we know, or would we chalk it up to chance?

Ivan Seeking

It can only be assumed to be coincidental.

D H

No, they had the ball game instead.

The ball game: http://www.ballgame.org/main.asp

The Hero Twins myth: http://www.mythweb.com/teachers/why/...ero_twins.html

Chronos

You are missing the point, ivan. I agree a single prediction is useless, two in a row - priceless.

russ_watters

Actually, I think it is more to the point to say the Mayans made no predictions (of the type being discussed here) at all! No need to quibble over whether being right once was lucky - they never played the game being attributed to them!

Ivan Seeking

On what do you base your implicit claim that any genuine psychic must be 100% accurate and 100% repeatable?

Would two tests be sufficient to say that psychic events happen, or would it take three, or four? How unlikely does an event have to be before chance can be definitively ruled out?

The point was that in my opinion, there could still be a signal below the noise. I'm not saying there is but rather that we have no way to know - that no definitive test can be cited. Assuming for a moment that they do occur, if true psychic events are rare, even people with those abilities may not be aware of it. Maybe it happens to everyone but only a few times in a lifetime? How do we rule out rare and random psychic events? I don't know if it is even possible to falsify that claim [possibility].

If psychic abilities exist and can be called to task, extensive testing shows at most only a very slight effect, barely detectable, and only with meta-analysis. But this says nothing of random events. In fact it may be that the data would support this possibility.

Ivan Seeking

I don't know enough about it to have an opinion, but we'll go with that for now unless someone has evidence to the contrary.

Chronos

Just as an aside, the 2012 prediction is not scientifically meaningful. The alignment of the sun with the galactic center is a line of sight event with earth. To assign it any causal affect implies the earth has a priveledged position.

D H

Correct. From a galactic point of view, the solar system is nowhere near the galactic plane; we are currently about 26 parsecs from it. (See http://arxiv.org/abs/0903.4206.) Crossing the galactic plane may have caused some of the mass extinctions in the past. Fortunately, on Dec. 21, 2012 we will still be about 26 parsecs from the galactic plane.

So, what did the Mayans predict for Dec. 21, 2012?

1. Crossing the galactic plane.
   The Mayans did not have telescopes. They could not have known that the solar system is a part of the Milky Way. Besides, the solar system is not crossing the galactic plane any time soon, not even any time soon in a cosmological sense of soon.
2. Planetary alignment.
   Whether Mayan numerology could predict planetary orbits is debatable. If they did have that capability, they would not have predicted a planetary alignment on the date in question because no such alignment will occur.
3. Pole flip.
   The Mayans had stone age technology. They did not know that magnetism existed. They did not know that the Earth had a magnetic field. Besides, pinpointing to a specific date something that takes several decades to transpire is just silly.
4. The end of the world as we know it.
   The Spaniards destroyed every piece of Mayan writing they could find. They didn't get everything, and some of what is left talks about events past Dec. 21 2012.
5. Winter solstice.
   Check. Mayan numerology could predict lunar eclipses, the equinoxes, and the solstices with amazing accuracy.

Hey! One out of five ain't bad.

CEL

Psychic phenomena have been studied for more than a century. No good evidence has been found.
I know that absence of evidence does not mean evidence of absence, but if those phenomena existed, we should have more than a few meta analysis to show.

fillindablank

My understanding of the Mayan's and 2012 is that they simply perceived it as the end of an age or era. They expected things would change, maybe dramatically but not the end of the world.

On the other hand there seems to be a confluence of predicted events around that date besides the Mayan calendar. Whether they are real predictions is another question. I am not convinced that Nostradamus made a prediction that actually includes that date. I am not sure about Caycee either. Other things that seem to be happening that could come to a head then: shifting of the Earth's magnetic field (doubtful), a solar maximum will be near that date, the current pope may be the last in a well documented prediction that names all the popes and predicts catastrophic events after the last one and he is old. I think there are some others that I can't remember too.

mgb_phys

The date simply clicks round to 13.0.0.0.0 so it's no different from Y2K
Probably rather less so, since very few computers use Mayan dates - and the ones that do will presumably handle all the digits!

CEL

St Malachy prophecy is probably a forgery perpetrated in the XVI century.
The mottos of all the popes until the 230th, Urban VII are perfect matches. When this pope died, the prophecy was made public and the motto of the 231th pope should be "De antiquitate urbis" (From the antic city).
One of the candidates was the cardinal of Civitavecchia (old city) and he became pope Gregory XIV. We don't know how much the revelation of the prophecy has contributed to his election, but we can wonder about it.
The subsequent mottos are very vague, like the quatrains of Nostradamus, so they fit anyone you want.

Ivan Seeking

Three hold-outs that I see are:

First, the formal analysis assumes that, if it exists, psychic phenomena can be controlled. I see no reason to assume that it can be controlled and tested on demand. Some of the more impressive stories come with dramatic events, such a murder, of the loss of a love one by some other means - events of extreme personal signficance. Does siginficance matter? How can we know? The tests to date show that if it exists, it cannot be controlled, but doesn't exclude the possibility that phenomena exist that can't be controlled.

Secondary to this are a few stories about psychics assisting with police investigations that were pretty impressive. Debunkers attribute these stories to chance or cleverness, but I have never seen a debunker find a dead body that the police couldn't.

Next, I believe the meta-analysis includes the bulk of serious experimentation to date. If indeed there is a trace signal for something real, that would still be interesting. We did have one paper published in the journal, The Foundations of Phyisics, that references known anomalous results as a fact. Interestingly, I believe the referenced results were only published in the JSE, which is not acceptable here as a journal reference, so at best the evidence for a signal is very weak.

We are way off topic here but I will clean things up later.

CEL

Anecdotal evidence serves as a clue to the existence of a phenomenon, not as hard evidence.
Those stories are told by the psychics themselves. To my knowledge, no serious police department has ever called a psychic to aid an investigation.
Except for faulty protocols, no sign has ever been found above chance.