Numerology
From RationalWiki
This topic is a pseudoscience, and is not accepted by the scientific community as a valid discipline.
Although it may use scientific terminology, it does not use scientific methodology.
Remember: just because it sounds right doesn't mean it's actually right.
Numerology is the study of, or belief in, the meaning of various numbers associated with people or events. There are many specific forms that numerology can take. Some try to convert letters to numbers and add them up, others try to assign properties and descriptions to each "number".
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[edit] Importance of numbers
| “ | 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42... 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42... 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42... 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, 42... | ” |
It is important to think a little bit about numbers and the meaning of cardinality (although a thorough treatment of this is not needed). Numbers in western languages are written in base ten - that is, when we run out of fingers to represent a number, we reuse them, wrapping around, as it were, adding another digit place to represent the previous decimal place.
It is apparent that the whole "theory" hinges on this relatively arbitrary choice of base, which probably stems from humans having five digits on each of two hands. Insect numerology, for instance, could yield very different answers - we can conjecture that intelligent insects may evolve a system of numbers in base 6. Computers use only base 2, being only able to process states as either "on" (1) or "off" (0). The universe, however, doesn't deal with numbers like this - if it even deals with numbers at all - just like it doesn't deal with a discrete concept of "species". As a result, numbers when considered like this are quite arbitrary and easily manipulated to indicate anything you like. A famous example being the absurd conclusion to the quest for the ultimate question in Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where the answer was 42 and the question was "what is 6 x 9?" - it was pointed out that 6 x 9 does in fact equal 42... in base 13.
Another functional absurdity of trying to assign meaning to numbers comes from playing with the numbers or digits in dates. Dates are also utterly arbitrary human constructions. The year "0" as defined in the CE/BCE system is technically just an arbitrary point, although it just so happens coincide with a more traditional system. The arbitrary factors of dates also include when we choose to make up for the discrepancies in the length of the year relative to exact numbers of days in a year (leap days, minutes, seconds, etc.).
Basically, numerology's "value" consists of the incredible woo experienced by people when shown that the number of letters in their names, when manipulated, show how important they are in the universal scheme of things.
Richard C. Hoagland often uses numerology in his attempts to prove that the Face on Mars is not natural.
[edit] Gematria
Gematria is the Kabbalistic study of Hebrew words by assigning every letter in the alphabet a numerical value (increasing by 1 until 10, increasing by 10 until 100, and increasing by 100 until 900). For example, Chai, the Hebrew word for life, is spelled chet-yod, giving it a gematria value of 18. However, the gematria of words is often purely coincidental, and can be used to prove nearly any point (including how the "pi mistake" isn't really a mistake).
[edit] Readings that will stun you with their honesty
This site promises "readings that will stun you with their honesty," but they've been rumoured to give the same reading to everyone,[1] or give nothing at all.[2] They're also here with different page layout.
