Eclipses Reveal a Comforting Clockwork in Our Chaotic Universe
Eclipses bring the future—or at least a tiny sliver of it—into sharp focus
How clearly can you envision the year 2866? It’s probably a dim view at best; after all, it’s eight and a half centuries distant. It’s as far in the future as the Crusades are in the past. This summer Paris will host the Olympics, which in theory happen every four years; doing the math, we can predict that the games will also take place, or at least ought to take place, in 2864 (“The Games of the CCXLIII Olympiad”). Dare we presume that a U.S. presidential election will also happen in 2864, with 2866 bringing a round of midterm elections?
Over such vast spans of time, our vision is inherently fuzzy. Will humans have colonized the solar system by then, or perhaps even ventured to the stars? Or will climate change, or some other natural or human-made disaster, have rendered our planet uninhabitable? Will killer robots rule the Earth—the “bad” timeline of the Terminator films come to life? Such musings bring to mind the old saying (variously attributed to Yogi Berra or the physicist Niels Bohr): “It is difficult to make predictions, especially about the future.”
But here’s something we can say about the year 2866:
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We know that a total solar eclipse will be visible from New York City on the morning of July 3 of that year. And we can be a good deal more precise than that: We know that the dark part of the moon’s shadow, called the umbra, will begin to sweep across the city beginning at 10:31:26 A.M., with totality lasting exactly two minutes and 43 seconds (and if we specified some particular spot in New York, we could be even…
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