Apocalyptic Folly

BRIAN: As part of this show, we wanted to talk to someone who would actually predicted the end of the world. So we call this guy.

OK. [INAUDIBLE].

BRIAN: SPOILER ALERT– he got it wrong.

JOHN GRIBBIN: Oh, hi. I’m John Gribbin. I’m a visiting fellow in astronomy at the University of Suffix these days. And I make my living writing books.

BRIAN: And his most controversial book–

JOHN GRIBBIN: Which I didn’t make a living from.

BRIAN: –came out in 1974. It was called The Jupiter Effect. It talked about a lot of astrophysical stuff, but there was one argument that really shook people up. In 1982, according to this book, planetary alignment would cause a massive earthquake that would devastate Los Angeles.

Now, we should say that this book didn’t literally predict the end of the world. It predicted events that other people decided were signs of the end of the world. But we’ll get to that later. John Gribbin was just 25 when he made this prediction, and he was working as an editor for the journal “Nature” at the time.

JOHN GRIBBIN: And I came across a paper in the American equivalent of “Nature,” “Science,” which was talking about changes in the length of the day. There are tiny changes which effect our time keeping. And in this paper, there was a bit about earthquakes and the length of day, because when the spin of the Earth changes, rather like an ice skater pulling their arms in and out, it makes the Earth wobble a little bit.

And there was some discussion about how this affected earthquakes. And the people who wrote this summed up at the end and said, but of course, nobody would suggest that the sun causes earthquakes. And I thought, well, hang on. You could suggest that, because if the sun makes the atmosphere change, which we know it does– it changes the winds, it changes the Earth’s spin, the Earth shakes– then it could cause earthquakes.

BRIAN: John dashed off to write a response to the article.

JOHN GRIBBIN: And what happened after that was, I forgot about it. And a couple of months later– I left it from an American publisher, who probably ought to be nameless– and who suggested that there was money to be made out of this. And that if I wrote a suitably sensational book about the sun causing earthquakes, that it might be a best seller and we’d all get rich.

And I was very young and naive at the time, and I thought, wow, you know. Not so much for getting rich, but writing a book, because I’d never written a book. I thought, that’s exciting writing a book.

BRIAN: So he called up his friend, an earthquake guy named Stephen Plagemann, and they wrote up a manuscript. Something that seems like a thoughtful, sober account of how planetary alignment might cause an earthquake. Gribbin says, it was pretty academic.

JOHN GRIBBIN: And that was, to some extent, our downfall. Because we were too sober and scientific for the guy who had originally suggested the book. And he sort of washed his hands of it. And he said, well, there’s no point in writing that book, because that’s not going to make us all rich.

BRIAN: What did he say, exactly, do you remember?

JOHN GRIBBIN: He said, I think his phrase was, you picked up the ball and run off with it. To which my reply was, well, it was my ball in the first place. So, you know, I didn’t want to go down the sensational route that he was suggesting.

BRIAN: I thought you kicked balls over there, not pick them up.

JOHN GRIBBIN: I guess that’s it. That’s more like it.

BRIAN: That should have tipped you off to this guy right away.

JOHN GRIBBIN: So we did the book, anyway.

BRIAN: They found another publisher. And Gribbin admits, yeah, he took that first publisher’s criticism to heart. He sensationalized just a little bit. He got a little more specific than he should have.

JOHN GRIBBIN: So where we fell down was in pointing the finger specifically at Los Angeles, and trying to be too precise about the date. And if we had said, you know, there’s an enhanced probability of increase seismic activity in the period between 1980 and 1984, compared with 1976 to 1980, we would have been right. And nobody would have bought the book.

BRIAN: So did you get more specific, and get farther away from what you knew to be the case, because you were writing a book?

JOHN GRIBBIN: Yes, definitely.

BRIAN: The strategy worked. The book was noticed, not necessarily by readers. Gribbin says he made only about $3,000 since 1974. But it was noticed by another author. A really influential one, a guy named Hal Lindsey. Lindsey was already famous for his 1970 book, The Late Great Planet Earth, which looked to current events to predict the apocalypse.

In 1980, Lindsey published another book, The 1980s: Countdown to Armageddon. It cited The Jupiter Effect to support his prophecies. And it’s spent 20 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List. It was at that point that Gribbin started getting a little bit uncomfortable.

JOHN GRIBBIN: I actually wrote another book, which is called The Jupiter Effect Reconsidered, which explained what had gone wrong, and what was right in the book. But it just sort of sank like a stone. It didn’t gain any attention or reviews, or anything like that.

And I remember once, somebody knocked at the door of my house. And I went to the door. And it was a group of Jehovah’s witnesses. And they started telling me about the forthcoming end of the world, you know? And I thought, it sounded familiar. So I said, hey, where did you get this from? And they started telling me about The Jupiter Effect. So I said, well, I wrote that book, you know, and it’s wrong. So the world isn’t coming to an end, do don’t worry, which rather nonplussed them.

BRIAN: What did they say to that?

JOHN GRIBBIN: They didn’t really say anything. They just sort of– the rug was pulled from under them– and we sort of politely said goodbye. And they went off to the next house, where, presumably they told them that the end of the world was coming.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

JOHN GRIBBIN: We were absolutely sincere. We really thought that there was an increased risk of an earthquake in ’82. And secondly, there’s going to be a big earthquake in Los Angeles, sometime, anyway. So we felt, well, even if the year’s wrong, it does no harm to make people more aware of the problems of the fault zones, and so on, there.

So there was an element that that sort of, kind of thought sort of a naive sense of obligation, that, you know– if we’d not said anything and there had been a big earthquake in ’82, how would we have felt them? There would have been no point in saying, oh, yeah, we could have told you that was going to happen.

So we felt that if we do, if you like the word frighten people into doing things, the things that we frightened into would be good for them, anyway. Building earthquake proof buildings, and having road systems which are not running across fault lines with eight lane highways, and stuff like that, it’s a good thing to do, anyway. So we didn’t feel that we were saying, run to the hills, give up your job, get a gun and prepare to fight off the marauding tribes of hungry people. We were just saying sensible things that were worth doing.

BRIAN: Having written The Jupiter Effect, even when you were busy refuting it, because people were misinterpreting what you had meant to say, was there a very tiny part of you that kind of wanted to be right?

JOHN GRIBBIN: Of course, yeah. I mean, but I’m mostly glad we were wrong, obviously. I’m really pleased that a million people didn’t die in 1982 because we were right. But there is this sort of, slight sort of wishfulness, you know, that it would have been nice to have done something in science that people really noticed for being right, rather than for be wrong. But, never mind, I can live with things the way they are.

BRIAN: John, thanks so much for joining us on BackStory today. Truly eliminating.

JOHN GRIBBIN: Thank you. It’s a pleasure to have a chance to put the record straight.

JOHN GRIBBIN: Bye, bye. hosts, after talking to Gribbin, who was a Ph.D. at Cambridge, and hanging out with these astrophysicists, I began to ask myself, well, if he can get these predictions wrong, who exactly can we trust? And I’d be curious to know how people throughout American history have figured out who to trust with these life and death predictions.