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Pastimes : Nostradamus: Predictions -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Father Terrence who wrote (1289)	8/15/1999 10:44:00 AM
From: Richnorth	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1615

I am somewhat surprised by Jonathan Swift's "imagination". He seemed to have been aware of photosynthesis long before it became known. This is evidenced by his suggesting in "Gulliver's Travels that the source of energy of a cucumber was the sun. Amazing! BTW, Mars' moons were aptly named. In Greek Mythology, Mars had three children, Phobos (meaning fear), Deimos (meaning terror), and a third one, Harmonia (meaning harmony), which seemed to have misled an astronomer (~1880) into looking for a third moon for Mars. Here's something interesting I dug up from uapress.arizona.edu Swift's prediction is surprising in that he not only had the number of moons right, but he also placed them close to the planet---the distances of the actual Martian moons are 1.4 and 3.5 diameters of Mars, compared with 3 and 5 as given by Swift. One would almost be tempted to think that Swift obtained an actual glimpse of the moons through a telescope, were it not for the fact that there was no telescope at the time anywhere close to being powerful enough to show them. Voltaire, in his 1750 story Micromégas, which tells of the visit by an inhabitant of the star Sirius to the solar system, also credited Mars with two moons, but here, at least, there is no mystery; he must have been influenced by Swift's tale. The idea that Mars might have two satellites harks back still earlier, however, to Kepler's misconstrual of the anagram in which Galileo announced the discovery of what we now know to be the ring of Saturn.2 Probably Swift had learned of Kepler's earlier surmise. Moreover, since at the time he wrote it was believed that Mercury and Venus were companionless, Earth had one satellite, Jupiter had four, and Saturn had five, Mars's place in this progression seemed to call for two moons. Since they remained hidden, the moons had to be very small, and if they were very close to the planet they would be lost in its glare. However Swift arrived at his prediction, there can be no doubt that it was simply a lucky guess.