Supernovas and predictions.

There is a supernova in the sky at the moment and as with all such events, Scotland has laid on a thick layer of cloud to frustrate viewing. It'll be there for a few days so I hope to catch sight of it in a break in the cloud layer before it's too late.

If you're in the Northern hemisphere, look for the constellation called Ursa Major, also called the Plough or Big Dipper. It looks like a saucepan and the supernova is a little above the outer two stars of the handle.

It was once believed that such celestial events were portents of disaster. Coming, as it does, just before the tenth anniversary of the mindless murder of around three thousand people on September 11th, 2001, it could be argued that it's ten years too late. Although when we have a peace envoy like this idiot, it might be best to be prepared anyway.

Something that happened at least ten years before 2001 might also be of interest. An artist made this picture which, at the time, would have looked like the product of a migraine-induced bad dream. Apparently - and I have no way of knowing if it's true or not - the picture was drawn in or before 1989.

I suspect the artist suffered migraines because there are two stylised instances of what I call 'migraine flare' in the top right of the picture. There might be a better medical term but I do not mention all my visual anomalies to doctors because that could get me sectioned.

Is there any connection? Did the artist dream about the events of 11th September 2001 twelve years before they happened? Two towers - repeated - and two planes, but not just any planes, passenger jets. The planes are not aimed at the buildings so maybe he didn't predict anything. There is nothing to suggest a prediction, nothing to connect the picture with the World Trade Centre until after the event. But even if he had drawn planes flying into towers, who would have paid any attention?

Even if he had seen the whole event and painted it exactly as it happened and included the date and time it was to happen, seriously, would you have listened or would you have scoffed? Personally, if you had said to me on 10th September 2001 that madmen were going to fly planes into the World Trade Centre I'd have laughed you out of the room. Prophecy has always been a thankless task and to be honest, if I knew a terrible thing was to happen tomorrow I would say nothing.

Why? In the current climate of fearful, weak humanity, if it was shown that I knew anything about the disaster before it happened, I'd be blamed for it.

The artist made no claim to prediction. He just drew what was in his head, possibly just something he dreamed that he thought would make an interesting picture. Maybe he had no idea that anything would ever connect that image to reality.

Science laymen, of course, regard such things as 'woo' but at the same time, quantum science questions even the linearity of time. Biology has stated that all humans predict the future, all the time. We have to. The conversion of light into images on the retina, the transfer of that information to the brain, the brain making sense of it, takes time. Not much time but if you're trying to catch a ball, it has passed the point where you see it as soon as you see it. You catch the ball because your brain predicts its trajectory and moves your hand to where it will be, not to where your eyes say it is.

The world you see has already moved into the past. Nobody sees the present. So is it at all conceivable that anyone could see the future?

There is the process of logical deduction. If I see a ball moving I can predict where it's going. So can you. We don't even have to think about it. World politics is more complex. However, take some current world events.

Bin Laden has been killed. The tenth anniversary of what is possibly the most evil action since the Holocaust is approaching. The demon-faced 'peace envoy' to the Middle East has declared he wants 'regime change' in Iran and we all know what that means, as does Iran.

So it is no stretch of logic to predict that something will be attempted on Sunday. Where? That's not so easy to determine logically (the variables in this thought experiment are not all subject to logical actions) but I would guess somewhere in America and somewhere important, but probably not New York. Security is going to be, rightly, very tight indeed.

What will be attempted? Well, it will involve the killing of easy targets because the madmen don't like face-to-face battles. It will be an attack on a densely concentrated civilian target. I don't know America well enough to even guess where but I am sure American analysts have been considering this for quite some time. I can only hope they catch the swines before they do anything.

The three who recently entered America and who are being hunted are, I would say, red herrings. There have been ten years to plan whatever they plan. If something is planned, those who are to act it out are already in place. Yes, they are lunatics, but they are not stupid.

I should note here that I do not equate 'madmen' and 'Muslim'. We had quite a bit of inconvenience with the IRA here in the UK a few years ago but despite meeting many Irish people, I never met an IRA member nor indeed anyone who referred to them as anything other than 'nuts'. Likewise, I have never met a Muslim who called for my destruction - and I've published papers with two Muslim students and would be delighted to teach another. How many students can produce enough work for a full paper in eight weeks? Both of those Muslim students did.

In the UK we treat Muslims as suspect. We say 'Their first loyalty is to Islam'. How soon we forget. Only a few centuries ago we said about Catholics that 'their first loyalty is to the Pope', and a century or so before that, the King ordered the Jews out of Britain. If schools still taught real history, this wouldn't be a surprise.

I have experienced the new wave of hate against the smoker, the drinker, the overweight, well, everyone who doesn't conform to the Borg standard. These are as nothing to someone who sees ghosts. We might think it strange that fundamentalists can persuade an idiot to blow themselves up in a shopping centre but how many of you believe in second hand smoke, the evil of alcohol, global warming and so much of the current wave of pseudoscience blasting out now? It is incredibly easy to persuade almost anyone to believe almost anything.

My grandfather smoked and so did my father and so did I for a long time. Still do if nobody's watching. I grew up in homes with coal fires, I set off fireworks and burned bonfires, I made my own explosives, and the odd thing is, I'm not dead after inhaling all that smoke.

Yet now, I hear of parents who wash and change clothes before touching their children because of third hand smoke. I hear of grandparents excluded from their grandchildren because they smoke.

The point is, these people will believe anything at all, even the utterly ludicrous. I've tested it far beyond the old cold-reading tricks. The fun I've had...

Yet they do not believe predictions even though scientifically, it is at least not impossible whereas scientifically, harm from third hand smoke is impossible. The quantum vision of time means that the past and future can leak into the present and once in a while someone will see it. Maybe as a dream, maybe as waking vision, as might have been the case in Versailles in 1901. Quantum science allows that, yet popular science denies it. The drones, those who are not scientists but believe in the power of the great god Science, will dismiss any deviation from their indoctrination at once, but real science does not. There isn't much of that left.

Maybe some people see the future. I don't see that as a magical paranormal ability, but more as a quantum-time accident. Or maybe as a simple result of assimilating information and predicting on the basis of logical extrapolation. Some people can do that without knowing what they are doing.

Predicting the future is possible. It can happen. Although in the world we have now, if it happens to you, I'd advise you to keep quiet about it.