Many people have heard of Nostradamus and his prophecies of recent horrible events such as the Great Fire of London, the rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, and most notably the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center. Take note of the following excerpt:
At forty-five degrees the sky will burn,
Fire to approach the great new city:
In an instant a great scattered flame will leap up,
When one will want to demand proof of the Normans.
This supposedly describes the 9/11 attacks especially with “Fire to approach the great new city”. It sounds strikingly similar to the terrorist attacks. However, there seems to be many holes in the prediction. As http://www.nostradamus.org writes that “New York is 40 43' degrees north of the equator so that wouldn't match.” 45 degrees could be an angle or temperature and fire to a new city could point to many different events as fire or flame is a negative event. A new city could mean any newly built or rebuilt city or any city that has the word “New” in it in the world. What does the Normans have to do with the 9/11 attacks?
I have to admit that after reading the excerpt from his book it seems strikingly similar, but as our book tells us he uses a writing style of being very vague with his predictions and always focusing on the negative. He wrote 942 four line prophecies down in his book and with all of them negative and vague at least one will point to an event that has happened. War is a very common negative event and is very common in his writings. People tend to seek out answers to events that they do not understand and will find answers in places that may not actually contain them. They want answers so they find them one way or another. Postdiction or retroactive clairvoyance is defined as an effect of hindsight bias that explains claimed predictions of significant events, such as plane crashes and natural disasters. So essentially people interpret things how they want to interpret things especially in times of stress or fear.
Scientific Perspectives on Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroactive_clairvoyance
Posts
I completely agree with you. I feel that when tragic event happen like "9/11" people just go back in time and try to see if any quote that a dead man wrote, relates to what happened. I don't think that people can predict what happens, I believe that it's just a ironic that a quote fits an event or description. Some people that prediction to far, to some superior level, but prediction have to be wrong or right, when it's right though people get spooked by the idea.
ReplyDelete