Michel Verheughe (guest) 16 May 2010 11:36
When the comet that Halley and Newton predicted would come back 76 years later, and did it, the world rejoiced; it was only a question of time before the "law of everything" could be found and the future, predicted.
Alas, nearly three centuries after, we know that that Relativity and Quantum shows a world that is much more fuzzy than that and the future cannot be predicted.
Still, nearly 90 percent of the earth population believes in a religion based on an omnipresent and omnipotent God. This what led the Belgian priest Jansen to believe that the course of history was already written and that God knew if we were to die in a state of sin, or not. Hence the Jansenist movement, of which Blaise Pascal was a fervent adherent, until the Pope excommunicated the whole bunch.
Today, nobody knows the true nature of time and if the future is already written. People like Georg Cantor and Kurt Goedle spent their life trying to understand time and both ended up very poorly. But it would be quite arrogant for the Mayans or anybody else to say that they know already the future.
Thank you for a nice site. Being a 62 years old grand-father, I am very worried about what such hoax can do to young people. At the age of 12 I was told we had no future because an atomic war was eminent. We survived the cold war, didn't we?
Best regards,
Michel Verheughe