05-06-07
Count down to 02:03:04 on 05/06/07
By Andrea Stone, USA TODAY
Numerologists: Your moment is about to arrive. Mathematicians and lottery players: You may want to pay attention, too.
On Sunday, at 02:03:04 a.m. on 05/06/07, time will align itself in a perfect pattern, 2-3-4-5-6-7.
For those who slept though last year's 1-2-3-4-5-6 moment at 1:02 a.m. and three seconds on April, 5, 2006, this is your second chance.
"There are numerical patterns in nature all around us," says Edward Burger, who teaches mathematics at Williams College in Williamstown, Mass. "Some are more significant and some are more beautiful than others. And this one is a silly one."
Silly, yes. And a moment that will not come again for another century, in 2107. Of course, the times and dates will align sequentially once every year until 9:10 and 11 seconds on Dec. 13, 2014, or 9-10-11-12-13-14. After that, time will revert to its usual untidy mix of hours, minutes and seconds passing through the days of our lives.
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Which is just fine for those who divine mystical meaning in numbers, says Michael McClain, who runs the website Astrology-Numerology.com. "Numerologists don't abbreviate the year as 07," he wrote in an e-mail. "It's little more than a sequence of numbers."
And one that could happen only in America, almost. Europeans — and most everyone else in the world — write dates in day-month-year order, not month-day-year. So in London or Paris, the magic moment won't come until June 5.
And that doesn't even begin to account for countries that don't use the Gregorian calendar. In Israel, the Hebrew calendar says it's 5767. By the Islamic calendar, it's 1438.
"There is absolutely nothing cosmic about this," says Geoff Chester, a spokesman for the U.S. Naval Observatory, which maintains the country's master clock in Washington, D.C. "I didn't get up last year" for 1-2-3-4-5-6, he says, "and I won't get up this year."
Still, the phenomenon is giving some Internet chatrooms fodder for idle conversation. At digg.com, the impending moment sparked a lively exchange, including one nostalgic post by "uglyredhonda" that said, "Still nowhere near as cool as 12:34:56 on 7/8/90."
Burger, a numbers theorist, might agree but says gatherings of geeks are preparing to count down anyway. "The real party mathematicians won't go to sleep," he says, his tongue planted only partway in his cheek. "There'll be a shot of tequila and they they'll move on."
That is, until we count from 1 to 6 at 01:02:03 on April, 5, 2106.
