In 1960, scientists scheduled doomsday for Nov. 13. Bills are still due.

One of the boldest predictions in the history of science didn't hide in the fine print. On Nov. 4, 1960, the journal Science put it in the title: "Doomsday: Friday, 13 November, A.D. 2026." That Friday is less than four weeks away, and the paper is making the rounds again after the historian Alan MacEachern wrote about it in The Conversation.

The lead author, Heinz von Foerster, was a physicist who had once worked as a stage magician, and it shows. He and two students fit 2,000 years of population estimates to one curve, and the curve shot to infinity on that Friday. "Our great-great-grandchildren will not starve," they wrote. "They will be squeezed to death." The date also happens to be von Foerster's 115th birthday, which Austria's Der Standard suspects was no accident.

Readers wrote in to call it "manifestly absurd," but the math held up for decades, beating most demographers' forecasts until the real world fell behind it around 1993. When Popular Science asked the mathematical biologist Joel Cohen if he's worried about Nov. 13, he said, "I'm still paying my bills. I'm still paying my taxes."

The Bible has a whole book for that frame of mind.

Ecclesiastes is the notebook of an old king who tried everything and wrote down what held up. Near the end he turns to farmers, who live by the weather, and warns about the one who keeps studying the sky. Two verses on, he says what to do instead:

Ecclesiastes 11:6In the morning sow your seed, and in the evening don't withhold your hand; for you don't know which will prosper, whether this or that, or whether they both will be equally good.

He isn't against checking the weather. But you can't know how tomorrow will go, any more than you can trace the wind (verse 5). So the not-knowing is a reason to get the seed in the ground today, because a forecast of doom can freeze your hand as surely as a forecast of plenty. MacEachern notes that a good magic trick ends with a reveal that puts everything back to normal, and here it is: Friday, Nov. 13 will be a Friday. The mail will come, and somebody will plant tulip bulbs for a spring she can't see yet. Tomorrow belongs to God, and today's work is the part he hands to us.