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On October 16, 1736, a comet that English mathematician William Whiston predicted would hit Earth and end all life … didn’t. And that's why you still have to get up and go to work each day.
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: October 16, 1736--
Early on a Monday morning many of us pray for that sweet meteor of death. Or comet. Whatever. So long as it gets the job done. We like to joke about it, but people in London believed Whiston’s predictions, and they freaked right the fuck out.
Whiston was a religious nutjob, but not the right kind of zealot to appease academia. See, he was both a minister and a professor of mathematics at the University of Cambridge. He helped popularize the works of Newton and sought to merge science and theology by seeking scientific explanations for biblical events. Noah’s flood? Comet did it, said Whiston.
But Cambridge faculty were required to follow Anglican doctrine, and Whiston rejected the whole Holy Trinity thing about how God is one God but there are three forms something something. So Cambridge said get the fuck out, heretic, and that was it for his academic career and he was reduced to lecturing in coffee houses like a wannabe writer who takes his laptop to Starbucks. Anyway, fucking comets.
And not just comets, but asteroids and meteoroids. Those fuckers hit Earth all the time, sometimes with devastating effects. Just ask the dinosaurs. Oh, wait. You can’t. Cuz they’re fuckin’ dead.
At the time, comets were all the rage because of that Halley guy. Whiston was getting more and more zealous, leaving Anglicanism for Baptism and becoming quite fundamentalist about it, preaching the apocalypse and backing it up with math. And he was convincing enough that many people believed his prediction that the Earth would be consumed by fire due to an intra-solar collision. Anxiety was so high that the Archbishop of Canterbury had to publicly denounce Whiston’s prophecy to get everyone to calm the fuck down.
The date of Whiston’s cometary Armageddon came and went and he became a laughingstock. A social pariah, he lived another 16 years, dying at the age of 84. Speaking of dying, NASA says you’re okay as far as any major rocks hitting Earth for a century or so.
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