The event I believe the Mayan calender predicts is the coincidence of the solstice with the galactic plane;
the solstice(s) are points on the ecliptic, which is the plane of the Earth’s orbit around the Sun.
Additionally the ecliptic crosses the galactic plane at a different pair of points;
however I seem to remember these two points more or less coincide in December 2012.
It is a remarkable achievement of the Mayan astronomers that they worked out the movement of the Sun/ Earth system so accurately so far in advance- they seem to have worked this all out two centuries BC.
This is a fantastic achievement of observational astronomy by people who were using stone implements.
since the appearance of Homo Sapiens humanity has been potentially capable of any modern-day intellectual acheivement, and the Mayan calender is one of the most impressive examples.
It is insulting to the memory of these excellent, dedicated skywatchers to construct a mountain of piffle around their observations.
[On preview, eburacum45’s made some of the same points.]
Correct, but you’re misunderstanding the original claim. Though it is a case where understanding it correctly shows just how arbitrary it is.
Through the year, the Sun traces out the circle called the ecliptic on the sky. Since this is just a projection of the Earth’s orbit, it isn’t effected by precession - the slow twisting of the Earth’s axis of rotation over a period of something like 26,000 years. What precession does change is where the Sun is on the ecliptic at the solstices. Basically, the winter solstice is when the Sun is at the southernmost point of the ecliptic, but precession is changing the position of the North Pole on the sky, so this point circles round the ecliptic over the precessional cycle.
Currently, the Sun is in Sagittarius at the winter solstice. Coincidentally, this point almost exactly coincides with the Galactic Equator - the plane of the Milky Way as projected out on the sky. It’s also fairly close to the position of the Galactic Centre, as seen on the sky. So there’ll be some true statement of the form: sometime soon the Sun at the winter solstice will be more closely aligned with the Galactic Centre than at any time in the last or next 26,000 years. Whether this is in 2012 will depend on exactly what you mean by “aligned” etc.
But, even so, the alignment isn’t terribly close. The ecliptic doesn’t get closer than about 5 degrees to the Galactic Centre, so they’ll still be off by 10 times the diameter of the Sun. By those standards, even this winter the Sun at the solstice will be “in the direction of” the Galactic Centre.
Is any of this of any physical significance? None whatsoever. To reiterate what’s been said before, this is just astrology. The centre of the Galaxy doesn’t give a damn about the Sun and the Earth.
Again true, but it depends which of the Mayan calendars is being refered to. They had several different ones, with very different bases. The simpler, which had much in common with those used elsewhere in Pre-Columbian America, were just counting out long interlocking cycles. You’re absolutely right, in that this is entirely arbitrary. Just a way of labelling days, not unlike our cycle of Sunday, Monday, Tuesday … Saturday, though on a much grander scale.
However, they had other calendar cycles that were based on the planet Venus. These calendars were approximations to naturally occuring astronomical cycles like the rising and setting of Venus and the phases of the Moon, but which had the property of being very good approximations to these cycles over long periods. A usually quoted figure is that they were only out by 1 day in 4000 years, in the sense of being able to predict, say, the phase of the Moon. Though the exact level of accuracy can be argued about to some extent. Akuma’s source is confusing these two types of calendar. The Venus cycle ones were utterly remarkable for the time in being able to approximate real astronomical events. But the supposed significance of 2012 isn’t based on these ones. It’s to do with a very long cycle in the older, more primitive and arbitrary counting calendar. This calendar was “exact”, but only in the same trivial sense that we always know the day of the week exactly.
Part of the confusion is that the likes of von Daniken have overstated the accuracy of the Venus cycles. Since the people promoting the 2012 nonsense tend to get their Mayan astronomy from such sources, this doesn’t help.
Ridiculing someone’s source is no substitute for explaining why an argument is wrong, but I can’t help but point out that this derives from here. Which is part of the page for this.
Some people literally making a song and dance of The End of the World ?
I recently took a Geology class, and much was made of the point that the poles’ magnetics haven’t changed in so long (many hundreds of thousands of years, IIRC), that no one knows what would happen to migrating animals if suddenly north magnetic pointed to the south. It’s one of those things I try not to think about.
Cite, please, for the Mayans even knowing the galaxy existed? The fact that the Milky Way was a galaxy, and not the entire universe, was not known until the beginning of the last century.
How would you define Galactic equator anyhow? A plane such that the mass of stars above it equal to that below it? How about number of stars? It can’t be equidistant from the edges of the galaxy, since there is no edge to the galaxy (no matter what was shown in the second ST pilot.)
Constellations cannot have any effect on anything. The constellations are just a pattern of stars that make up a picture as identified from earth. Go someplace else, and there are no (or different) constellations.
And BTW, even if something did happen in the center of the galaxy, we wouldn’t know about it for thousands of years. Not to mention anything happening here would take thousands of years to affect anything in the center of the galaxy. It’s called the speed of light.
All Akuma Kage’s stuff about the Mayan calendar is just a garbled rehash of the ideas of John Major Jenkins.
Jenkins however has his critics. There is not even agreement about some of his basic facts. Not all Mayan scholars believe that the Long Count ends on 21 December 2012 and at least one of his critics has argued that Jenkins’s supposedly crucial alignment has already happened.
