So, taking those title elements in reverse order: The young Witness is me ? this story goes back to the early sixties. The three dates are: February 1986, August 11th 1999, and June 8th 2004. It's the fact that the last of those dates is , after all these years, finally nearly here that made me think of writing this post.
I?ll start this story with my tenth birthday A bit of background: for a period of time between when my mum was door-stepped/studied/baptised and when my dad came along, seven years in fact, we still had birthdays in our house. Christmas went straight away ? an early victory for mum, but birthdays persisted, albeit in a modified form: no cards, no parties, but you were allowed a present. Just the one, from mum and dad, no others, and it could not be a surprise, and it could not be wrapped. I guess this was the best deal my mum could strike over the issue.
It might suggest to you something of the kind of child I was that for this birthday I was offered a choice: a bike or a telescope. Your suspicions about me will be confirmed when I tell you that I went for the telescope. At ten years old I was pretty much a speccy-four-eyes swot. I was the kind of kid you describe as ?very studious?, I loved reading and science in general but was particularly passionate about astronomy. Given half a chance I would launch into a speech about the phases of the moon; I would bore the pants off anyone prepared to let me tell them about the moons of Jupiter or the rings of Saturn.
But I can?t say that spouting off about astronomy ever really caused me a problem in the congregation. Sure, there was that type of Witness, by nature anti-intellectual, who regarded science with suspicion, and would disapprove and dole out counsel ? ?man?s learning is foolishness in the eyes of Jehovah!? We even had one chap in our study group who took particular delight (it seems to me) in telling me that in the New Order Jehovah would, in the process of restoring the Paradise Earth, reconstruct the Noah?s Flood water-canopy. ?There?ll be no stars to see then, will there? Ha! ? I couldn?t think of anything more awful.
But equally, there were some kindly souls who would indulge my precocious behaviour and would even quote those scriptures that say what a fine thing it is to behold the heavens and gaze in wonder upon what God has created. So, it evened itself out.
What DID used to get me into trouble was the date-predicting.
I?ll explain.
The thing about astronomy as a hobby, it does give you really a very long-term perspective on things. At ten years old, back in 1965, I had memorised - and as I already explained - was enough of a show-off to bore anyone around with whatever ?fascinating? night-sky fact had currently taken my fancy. And sometimes that meant reciting upcoming dates of significant astronomical events.
?Hello, Brother Mature! Did you know that Halley?s comet last was seen in 1910 and will return in February 1986??
?Good Morning, Sister Remnant. I was just reading that the next total eclipse of the sun visible from England will happen on August 11th 1999 !?
You get the idea.
My favourite of all these dates was the one about the next transit of Venus. A transit is when a planet passes in front of the sun. Viewed with the right equipment it looks like a small round black dot slowly travelling across the face of the sun, and it takes an hour or two. The last transit of Venus was in 1882. The next one ? as I never tired of telling people - would be ?June the 8th A.D. 2004 ?; I always used to say that ? ?A.D. Two Thousand and Four? because it was such an absurdly, impossibly distant date. Just to say 2004 didn?t do it justice ? it had to have the ?A.D.?
This kind of talk did not go down at all well with witnesses of any disposition, and used to get me into trouble. I remember walking home from the bookstudy with my mum:
?Oh , Duncan! Why do you even say those things? You know as well as I do that there?s NEV ER GOING TO BE ANY 1986!?
And I knew she was right, and I felt ashamed. But weeks would pass and I?d forget myself and be drawn back to the astronomy. I would talk about this kind of stuff with likeminded friends at school, and sooner or later would again blurt out some ?inappropriate? date prediction to someone in the congregation.
I can?t pretend that this was a major problem, really. On the whole I was regarded as a pretty good little witness ? plenty of platform parts, even at the age of 10, so I must have been doing okay, theocracy-wise. Nonetheless, I do remember being counselled from time to time over talking about 1999 and ?A.D. 2004?.
***
Well, the years passed. The sixties came and went, and as the seventies started I was enrolled as a fine young pioneer. Tragically, though, by the end of that decade I had been lost to the World. Though, at this time, no longer an active in my starry hobby, I still took an interest in astronomy, and I never, in all my life, forgot any of those three dates.
And, do you know what? It turned out that there WAS such a thing as 1986, after all.
Halley?s comet ? after 76 years of waiting for it, and a spectacular showing the previous time out ? turned out to be a massive disappointment. It was, from what I recall, not really visible from the northern hemisphere, and even in the south wasn?t much to look at. The excitement centred mainly on the space probe they sent up to intercept it. I followed the coverage on T.V.
And you know what else? It turned out that there was such a thing as 1999, too!
The eclipse was fairly big news here in the back in the summer of 1999. Lots of coverage in the press and T.V. And me? If you can believe this, having known about it 35 years before everybody else (okay, not literally, but you know what I mean), I had organised things such that I was on holiday in Florida with my family. I remember saying to my wife as we were booking it the previous Christmas, ?you know this means we?ll miss the eclipse?? but I already knew that the eclipse was only total from the southern tip of England (Cornwall , Devon ) which would be packed out, traffic-jammed, with nowhere to stay. And we HAD promised the kids we?d take them to Disney in August ? so, what the hell. As it happens, it turned out cloudy that day, anyway, so it spoiled the viewing.
So, bringing it all up to date, it turned out there was such a thing?
And here we are, all of us, living in that wondrous, distant, impossibly far-off-in-the-future time ? A.D. 2004. I am now that fifty-year old man that I kind of knew I would be, but could never imagine back when I was 10.
And the transit is now less than two months away.
I still have a lot of my old astronomy books from when I was small, and something I remember in one of them about this transit made me go and dig it out.
It was one of my favourites ? ?The Young Astronomer? by E.A. Beet (Thomas Nelson, Edinburgh, 1962) ? and I have it open in front of me as I type. It still has my handwritten notes in pencil and ballpoint in the margins from all those years ago. The bit I was interested in re-reading I found pretty quickly on page 2. Old E.A. is talking about the need a young astronomer has for patience and perseverance:
? He must be prepared to wait for months or even years for some event to occur; perhaps he wants to see a transit of Venus. There is one in A.D. 2004 - lucky fellow: the writer of this book will not live to see it, but he will??
Now, to say this passage haunted me down the years would be a wild overstatement, but it is true that I never forgot it. And it?s obvious now where I got the ?A.D.? from.
So, thinking about this, I decided to find out whether he did make it or not. With the internet these days it?s a simple matter to get information about people ? especially published authors. It only took me a few minutes.
It turns out, after all these years of not knowing, that E.A. was Ernest Agar, he was born in 1904 (so, a fair bet that he wouldn?t live to 2004) and he wrote many books on maths and astronomy from the forties through to the seventies. He was President of the Sheffield Astronomical Society in the sixties. And, sadly, he died in 1997 ? at the grand old age of ninety three. So he didn?t miss the transit by much, but he did turn out to be right in his book, after all.
I still have a telescope ? a five inch reflector, and me and my two boys get it out from time to time and look at stars and planets. But I doubt that we?ll be observing the transit. You need specialist filters and projecting equipment and so on. (All JWD readers know that it?s insane to look directly at the sun with a telescope, right?)
But there?s bound to be a bit of coverage in the press, and articles in Scientific American and so on, so I?ll follow along in those, and see the pictures.
And that?ll be the third of my Big Dates, come and gone. Looking back, I would say that I?ve done rather better at this date-business than the Watchtower. What do you think?
***
The next appearance of Halley?s comet will be in 2062. The next total eclipse of the sun visible from the U.K. will be in 2090. Transits of Venus come in 8-year pairs. After the 2012 showing the next one will be in 2117.
I feel like ending with : ?The writer of this post will not live to see it.? But it sounds so gloomy doesn?t it?
Never mind.
Regards to all,
Duncan.
p.s.
Something I was reminded of in the course of writing this: If, by any chance, any of you JWD readers has a speccy-four-eyes 10-year old son, and he has an older, definitely NOT studious, football-mad brother, and you get the younger lad telescope - just try to give him a measure of protection, okay?
Let me tell you, when you?re out in the garden, with tripod and telescope, looking at some star, and it?s just taken minutes of patient work to line it up right, and your older brother turns up, yanks the thing out of your hand, points it level at the houses across the street and says: ? phwooooar! I just saw a nude lady in that window!?
- well, it?s every bit as funny the hundredth time he does it as it was the ninety-ninth.