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00:00Now, here on BBC Two, Horizon investigates the Bible Code.
00:20Michael Drossman has written a best-selling book
00:23which predicts the end of the world in three years' time.
00:30His information comes from a secret code hidden in the Bible.
00:37World War, Atomic Holocaust and End of Days
00:40are all encoded in the Bible with the same year, 2006.
00:45We may have less than three years to save our world.
00:51That is the warning encoded in the Bible.
00:55What makes Drossman's predictions unusual
01:00is that he claims to have serious scientific backing.
01:06He's either stumbled on one of the most important discoveries ever made,
01:11or he and the millions of people who take him seriously
01:14have got it badly wrong.
01:19This week, Horizon puts the Bible Code to the test.
01:23Five years ago, Michael Drossman sealed three extraordinary predictions
01:50in an envelope, and gave them to a top Manhattan lawyer for safekeeping.
01:58There it is.
01:59In 2003, he opened it.
02:06The warnings that are most clearly stated in the code are
02:10A, the world will face global economic collapse,
02:15starting in the Hebrew year 5762.
02:222002 in the modern calendar.
02:25You know, that one came true.
02:28B, this will lead to a period of unprecedented danger.
02:32As nations with nuclear weapons become unstable,
02:36terrorists can buy or steal the power to destroy whole cities.
02:45After 9-11, no one doubts it.
02:49And then, of course, there's the most terrible of the three predictions.
02:53God help us if this one comes true.
02:57The danger will peak in the Hebrew year 5766,
03:012006 in the modern calendar,
03:05the year that is most clearly encoded with both world war and atomic holocaust.
03:11He says the predictions need not come true.
03:24They're a warning to the world to change its ways.
03:30The basis for it all is a code,
03:32which he says has been found in the Bible.
03:35What makes it extraordinary
03:37is that it appears to be backed by scientific evidence.
03:41Michael Drosnin is not the first person
03:52to claim to have found hidden messages encoded in the Bible.
03:59For thousands of years,
04:02people have believed that behind the surface text
04:04are coded messages containing extra information.
04:11in the Middle Ages,
04:14Jewish mystics scoured the Old Testament
04:17for concealed meanings.
04:22Isaac Newton,
04:24the greatest scientist of his age,
04:26devoted more than half a century
04:28to looking in the Bible
04:29for hidden references to Armageddon.
04:31Yet few outside religious circles
04:32have ever taken the idea of coded messages in the Bible seriously.
04:37Yet few outside religious circles
04:40have ever taken the idea of coded messages in the Bible seriously.
04:43That was until an exceptional man came along.
04:45In 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia,
04:47the Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia,
04:48the Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia
04:49and the Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia
04:50had been found in the Bible seriously.
04:51That was until an exceptional man came along.
04:53That was until an exceptional man came along.
04:54That was until an exceptional man came along.
05:11In 1968, when Russian tanks invaded Czechoslovakia,
05:15Ilyahu Rips was a gifted young student of mathematics in Latvia.
05:19As demonstrators around the world took to the streets,
05:26Rips made an extraordinary personal protest.
05:30Rips went to a public square in Riga,
05:35put a gasoline on himself and burned himself
05:38to call the attention of the world
05:43to this evil act of the Soviet empire.
05:49Rips was sent to a Soviet psychiatric hospital,
06:02a common punishment for political protestors.
06:05There, with time on his hands,
06:12he worked on a mathematical problem
06:14that was to amaze the academic world.
06:17When Rips was in prison,
06:22he had the idea to work on a famous unsolved problem
06:24called the Dimension Subgroup Conjecture.
06:27This had been a problem
06:28which Westerners thought they had solved.
06:29In fact, there was a published paper
06:31in one of the best journals
06:32by very esteemed famous people
06:34claiming to have solved this conjecture
06:35and given a proof of it.
06:39When he was in detention,
06:41he had no paper to work with,
06:42so one of the guards actually got him some pencil
06:44and a little piece of toilet paper.
06:46Using only this, he was able to refute
06:48the greatest minds in the West.
06:50He showed this conjecture was actually false,
06:52even though all the experts thought
06:53they had proven it was true.
06:56This turned the subject on its head.
07:02After two years, Rips was released
07:05and allowed to emigrate.
07:12He arrived in Israel with a reputation
07:15as a man of unshakable integrity
07:17and as a brilliant theoretical mathematician.
07:22Rips is an extraordinary mathematician.
07:24I mean, not just an outstanding mathematician.
07:26There are many outstanding mathematicians,
07:28but he's a world star.
07:30I mean, Oxford and Cambridge would be delighted
07:33to have Rips as a professor there.
07:39It was now in Israel that Rips was introduced
07:42to the world of the Bible codes.
07:45One well-known form of code found in the Bible
07:57is called a skip code.
08:02Skip codes involve a different way to read a text
08:04than we normally do.
08:05Usually we read one letter at a time,
08:07the first letter, the second letter,
08:08and the third letter, and so forth.
08:10But with a skip code, we might start with the third letter
08:13and then skip ahead 10 to the 13th letter,
08:15and then to the 23rd letter, and so forth.
08:17And maybe that would spell out a new word,
08:19jumping 10 letters at a time.
08:21Here's an example.
08:22There's a sentence here that says,
08:23my way of showing a skip code is encrypted
08:25in the very words I put down here.
08:27Let's take the first letter and jump every 14
08:29and make that red.
08:32It's very hard to read as it's written here.
08:33We see the letter M-A-R-Y-H-A-D.
08:38It's not so legible.
08:39So to make it look nicer and understand it better,
08:41what we usually do is we break the line
08:43before each red letter.
08:45So now we have each line starting with the red letter,
08:48and now the red letters are in a column
08:50and it's very easy to read.
08:51Mary had a little lamb.
09:02One of these simple codes,
09:04particularly called Rips's imagination.
09:06It appears at the beginning of the Torah,
09:11the Jewish Bible, which is made up of the first five books
09:14of the Old Testament.
09:18When we start with the first T in the book of Genesis,
09:25in fact, it comes in the first verse,
09:28In the beginning, God created heaven and earth.
09:32Starting with the first T and taking every 50 letters,
09:37the word Torah appears.
09:40The word Torah appears.
09:42It was enough for us to be able to read in the first verse,
09:43the word Torah appears.
09:44It was enough for us to be able to read in the first verse,
09:45the word Torah appears.
09:46Exactly the same pattern appeared in the second book of the Torah,
09:50Exodus.
09:51Again, starting with the first T and skipping 49 letters.
09:54Again, starting with the first T and skipping 49 letters.
09:57The word Torah appears.
10:09It was enough to me to be most intrigued,
10:13to think something very interesting might go on.
10:17Rips began to employ a computer program that could search
10:27for skip codes like this at enormous speed.
10:33He could have had no idea where it would lead.
10:47Rips and his colleagues now came across messages
10:53nobody had ever found before.
10:57One of them is known as the Hanukkah Code.
11:01Hanukkah is an important religious festival in Judaism.
11:04And the word Hanukkah is written as a skip code going backwards.
11:11Hanukkah.
11:13Another important name associated with Hanukkah
11:15is the Hasmonean dynasty.
11:17They're written here, Hashmonai.
11:23That's the Hebrew word for Hasmoneans.
11:24And that's also a skip code.
11:26So these two names and concepts are very closely linked,
11:29not only in the story of Hanukkah,
11:30but also in proximity here,
11:32as skip codes within the text of the Torah.
11:41To Rips, the implications of the code were breathtaking.
11:45The Torah had been written down some 3,000 years ago.
11:57The events described in the Hanukkah story
11:59took place some 2,000 years later.
12:02If this really was a message,
12:05then it had been encoded in Genesis
12:07thousands of years before the events it describes.
12:11This was no longer just a word game.
12:15The Bible codes were seeing into the future.
12:19Then, Rips stumbled on a message which seemed to confirm
12:24this extraordinary power in a very personal way.
12:28It was January 1991.
12:44The first Gulf War was imminent,
12:46and Israel was tensed for an Iraqi attack.
12:50The big question was when would it come?
12:55It was in the early January and the tension was very high,
12:59and in fact it was increasing.
13:01A friend showed me a table with a coat on which one says Saddam Hussein.
13:08Near this was a second piece of information.
13:27The most important thing is that through this we have actually a Hebrew date.
13:43In fact, it says fire on the sword of Shwat,
13:49which in this year it was on January 18th.
13:53The code seemed to be predicting an attack on January 18th.
14:01Could it possibly be right?
14:12Two weeks later, Rips got his answer.
14:23In the early hours of January 18th, exactly as predicted, Iraqi missiles hit Israel.
14:36Rips, sitting at home with his family, will never forget it.
14:44There was a midnight alert, and we all rushed in the sealed room and put our gas masks on us.
14:52There was, of course, a sense of horror of all this event.
15:05Nevertheless, I recall I was overfilled with a sense of a scientific joy, the code's work.
15:12Just think about it.
15:13When you analyze in a proper way the letters in an ancient book that exists for thousands of years,
15:21you're able to tell about such a major present event as a missile flying right at your head.
15:30Ilyahu Rips is a rigorous scientist.
15:45He now wondered, was it all just a coincidence, or could he find serious scientific evidence for the codes?
15:55Ilyahu Rips had noticed that what characterized the Bible code messages was that the information appeared as a cluster of related words.
16:14What he needed was a way of determining whether this clustering was significant or accidental.
16:23Rips had heard of research suggesting that the names of famous rabbis might be encrypted in the Bible close to their dates.
16:33He decided to build an experiment around them.
16:40An expert was asked to provide a list of 32 rabbis paired with their dates of birth or death.
16:52All had lived long after the Bible had been written.
16:59Then, Rips searched Genesis for each pair.
17:04For each of the resulting pairs of a name of date, we checked in the book of Genesis.
17:15As we see here, an example.
17:18On this table, the name of the Holy Orhachaim comes together with the date of his death, which is 15th of Camus.
17:31So, there is a close meeting between the date and the name.
17:36Rips now constructed a complicated geometrical formula to quantify how close these clusterings were.
17:49He called this the measure of compactness or closeness.
17:58What they do is they consider Sage A and date 1 and then they take a page of text.
18:07Sage A might look like that.
18:13Date 1 might be something like this.
18:20What they do is define a distance or measure of closeness, physical closeness in the text between these two.
18:27And there will be distances for each of these pairs going down with 32 in all.
18:40Rips then hypothesized that if the rabbis and their dates had been deliberately encoded in the Bible,
18:48then the measures of compactness would be smaller than in a random list of names and dates.
18:55So, for comparison, he jumbled up the names and dates and generated almost a million randomly paired lists,
19:04and searched Genesis for these.
19:09The result seemed absolutely conclusive.
19:14The average measure of compactness was much smaller in the real list than in more than 999,000 random lists.
19:29Rips now calculated the odds against this happening by chance.
19:35They were 62,500 to 1.
19:41One of the best mathematical minds in the world seemed to have found strong scientific evidence
19:47that there really are codes in the Bible that can see into the future.
19:52In your face you see something, a kind of a living miracle, and it was a very strong feeling that I cannot forget.
20:13And now gradually one gets used to it, yes, even one can be used to miracles.
20:18Rips and his team sent their extraordinary findings to Professor Robert Cass.
20:34Cass is a statistician who then ran a prominent statistical journal.
20:39He didn't believe for a moment that the results could be right.
20:43I had it sent out to referees. I assumed that the referees would find the flaw rather quickly,
20:49and that would be the end of the story.
20:51Well, that's not what happened.
20:54The referees could find no fatal flaws in the analysis.
20:59Cass took the relatively unusual step of sending it out for further scrutiny.
21:06I sent it to a third referee, and the third referee had very specific suggestions for additional analyses
21:12that the authors should do. The authors did those additional analyses.
21:16The referee said, I think this will end the story, but when the authors did the additional analyses,
21:20in fact, the effect persisted. And at that point, the referees really said they were baffled.
21:27They didn't for a moment believe it, but they couldn't see what was wrong.
21:33Cass had no choice but to publish it.
21:38Meanwhile, in New York, another man was also looking at the codes.
21:57Michael Drossman is a successful investigative reporter.
22:04He's worked in the past for the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal.
22:09He considers himself a man who deals in facts, not fortune-telling.
22:16In the early 1990s, he heard about Ripps' work and went to see him.
22:27I thought that I'd be out of there within an hour, certain that this was all fantasy.
22:37Instead, I spent a week with Dr. Ripps, and at the end of the week, I was certain he was on to something real.
22:48Drossman returned to New York, taking with him a copy of Ripps' computer program.
22:58For months, he tested it out. Message after message appeared.
23:08I looked for events that had already happened. The Kennedy assassination.
23:16President Kennedy appeared once, encoded in the Bible.
23:23Then I saw the next three letters in Hebrew, told of his assassination.
23:29It said, to die.
23:32He looked for other things. He found references to President Clinton's election.
23:47The first moon landing.
23:51The Watergate scandal.
23:57And the Oklahoma City bombing.
24:01Then, he came across a message that would change his life.
24:10I was looking for the names of world leaders.
24:13I typed in the name of the Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin.
24:19It was encoded once, and crossing his name in perfect Hebrew.
24:25It said, assassin will assassinate.
24:30Just like in a crossword puzzle, Yitzhak Rabin going down, assassin that will assassinate, crossing his name.
24:39Drossman checked with Professor Ripps to see whether the combination of words could be accidental.
24:45He calculated that the odds were 6,000 to 1 against it being charged.
24:52Within a week, Drossman was in Israel with a warning.
25:07I'm an American.
25:10I'm an American.
25:12There, he wrote a letter to Rabin.
25:16I have uncovered information that suggests your life is in danger.
25:22We should meet in confidence.
25:26But Rabin wouldn't see him.
25:31Then, a year later, almost exactly 12 months after Drossman's prediction, Rabin was gunned down by an Israeli extremist.
25:43I remember this so well.
25:55I actually sunk to the floor.
25:58And it wasn't the fact that Rabin had been killed.
26:01That was not the shock.
26:03As great a shock as that was.
26:05The shock was that the Bible code was real.
26:09I had believed it in my head.
26:11Or I never would have won the Prime Minister.
26:14But I didn't believe it in my heart.
26:16I didn't believe it in my gut.
26:19And at that moment, I did.
26:35In 1997, Drossman published a controversial book on the Bible codes.
26:43It was a runaway hit.
26:49It was soon after this that he came across the three apocalyptic predictions that would come to dominate his life.
27:00Economic collapse.
27:04World instability.
27:10And nuclear holocaust in 2006.
27:14For Michael Drossman, it was time to warn the world.
27:23I don't know what to do.
27:25Give me your advice.
27:26Shimon Peres asked me to call and arrange the meeting with him for this week.
27:36Drossman has had meetings with Israeli intelligence, the Pentagon, and some political leaders.
27:42The suggestion that is encoded in the Bible is that terrorism can actually bring on the destruction of our entire world.
27:57I think there's a very good chance that President Bush will meet with me.
28:01He's religious and sincerely so.
28:05He believes in prophecy.
28:07So this will not be difficult for him to accept.
28:10He knows it sounds incredible.
28:14But Drossman is so confident he's right, that some years ago he issued a challenge.
28:25When my critics find, in advance, a message about the assassination of a prime minister encrypted in Moby Dick, I'll believe them.
28:34He was about to encounter someone who would challenge the very existence of the codes.
28:50Brendan McKay is an expert in advanced probability theory.
28:54He's been investigating mathematical mysteries for almost 30 years.
29:03He decided to take up Drossman's challenge.
29:09He bought a copy of the 150-year-old American novel Moby Dick.
29:13And, using a search program similar to RIP's, began to comb it for hidden messages.
29:24The results were, at first glance, remarkable.
29:28Here, by way of comparison, we have Mr. Drossman's example of Yitzhak Rabin and assassin who will assassinate.
29:41Compare that to Moby Dick.
29:44Here we have Kennedy, K-E-N-N-E-D-Y.
29:50And underneath his name it writes,
29:53He shall be killed.
29:59There were also references to more recent events.
30:08Here you see, in the vertical line, the word, Lady Diana.
30:13And across, very near to her name, it says,
30:18Mortal in these jaws of death.
30:21Even that much would be interesting, but there's very much more in this picture.
30:24Here, for example, we see the word, Wales, Princess of Wales, together with the word, Royal, R-O-Y-A-L.
30:35Also in the same picture, the name of her boyfriend, Dodie, appears many times.
30:43I've marked two of them.
30:44And finally, the driver of the car, Henri Paul, is named just here. We have Henri and Paul.
30:53Paul.
30:57Mackay has made it very clear.
31:00These are not statistically significant messages.
31:04All they show, he says, is that you can find things that look extraordinary.
31:10Even messages that seem to see into the future, if you look for long enough in a big enough text.
31:15What's really going on, of course, is that the computer can search in so many ways, millions or hundreds of millions of ways,
31:25that even though any particular pattern is unlikely, he's going to find something sooner or later.
31:31But Drosnin will have none of it.
31:40He claims there are two critical differences between his and Mackay's findings.
31:46Nobody else has ever found anything like his ravine prediction, a forecast made before the event occurred.
31:53Moreover, he says, each one of his findings has been shown to be statistically significant.
32:03They are not chance clusterings of words.
32:06It is absolutely true that if you're a fool looking for nonsense in the Manhattan Telephone Directory, you can find it.
32:15And if not in the Manhattan Telephone Directory and the Encyclopedia Britannica.
32:21Take a big enough text, and it is true, you will find anything at all encoded with equal distance skip sequences.
32:30Everyone understands that.
32:33What you will not find in any book except the Bible is related, accurate information encoded in a statistically significant way
32:45Every single major encoding is mathematically significant.
32:53This is the core of Drosnin's argument.
32:57Mackay is merely playing word games.
33:01Each one of Drosnin's findings has been checked by one of the world's great mathematicians.
33:06I am only a journalist, but I have checked every important finding with Dr. Ripps.
33:15I could not be more rigorous because he is a meticulous mathematician and one of the world's great mathematicians.
33:23He agrees the statistics are solid.
33:26But as Mackay examined Drosnin's findings, he thought he saw a flaw.
33:43Ripps is a brilliant mathematician, but he is not an expert in statistics.
33:48It's a very different science.
33:51To get a figure recognised by statisticians, you need to follow a rigorous statistical procedure.
33:58In order to actually give a statistical significance to a Bible code type finding, it's essential that you specify in advance what it is that you have to find in order to be successful.
34:15And you specify the way in which this experiment result will be analysed.
34:23And without such a formal experiment, the numbers are simply meaningless.
34:28They've got no statistical value.
34:33In other words, to get a scientifically meaningful statistic, you need to state in advance exactly what you're looking for.
34:41That is not how Drosnin works.
34:43He specifies a name, like Yitzhak Rabin, but he does not specify in advance any other phrases he would regard as significant.
34:55He did not, for instance, specify assassin that will assassinate.
34:59This lack of precision in his search criteria vastly increases his chances of finding something that appears to be significant.
35:11He puts in words and he looks for interesting things. He doesn't have a pre-specified notion of what's going to be accepted. He's just looking for something that's interesting. And the concept of something that's interesting is not sufficiently precise scientifically that you can determine the probability of it or not.
35:32But Drosnin defends his statistics to the hilt. And what's more, he's backed by the findings of Professor Ripps.
35:42What no one can do is what Dr. Ripps has done with the code in the Bible.
35:54He has consistently found accurate related information encoded in the same place against odds that any mathematician would agree are beyond chance.
36:10Which is the probability that when you take a random pairing.
36:13Mackay now shifted the focus of his attention.
36:17He joined forces with a group of Hebrew speaking scientists to take a closer look at Ripps' original Rabbi's experiment.
36:25The one that seemed to offer scientific evidence for the existence of the codes.
36:37Like others before them, Mackay and his colleagues couldn't significantly fault the statistics.
36:43Ripps had clearly stated in advance precisely what he was looking for.
36:48But then they took a closer look at the data, the names and dates of the rabbis.
36:58It was now that they found something intriguing.
37:04Ripps' original experiment had been based on the names of 32 rabbis.
37:10But there were more than 32 possible versions of their names.
37:14Of course there's nothing strange about having many names.
37:19President Bush is also called W or George W Bush or the President of the United States and many other things.
37:27So it's quite a normal thing to have many names.
37:30Having multiple spellings was also a normal thing in the Middle Ages when these great sages lived.
37:35Some of the rabbis had more than a dozen versions or spellings of their names.
37:44We found that only some of these names and some of the spellings were used.
37:54And we wondered why this particular selection of names was used.
38:03And in particular we wondered whether there was some process in the way that the names were selected that biased the result in favour of a positive outcome.
38:13In short, could the experiment's extraordinary result be caused by the particular versions of the names that had been fed into the computer?
38:28Would different versions give a different result?
38:31To test the idea, McKay asked a qualified expert to draw up a new list.
38:42It contained the same rabbis but some of their names in different though equally valid versions.
38:49He then re-ran the experiment.
38:51There was absolutely no statistically significant clustering of names and dates.
39:00McKay now began to wonder.
39:03There's a well-known phenomenon in statistics called tuning.
39:07An often unconscious process in which data can be subtly reshaped in a way that can influence the result.
39:16Could this explain RIP's extraordinary findings?
39:19If so, it would undermine the scientific basis of the Bible codes.
39:32Professor RIP's has a reputation as a man of unimpeachable integrity.
39:39He says he took great care to ensure his experiment was not tuned.
39:43The data was collected independently by a respected scholar, Professor Havlin, who did it without any knowledge of how it will affect the result of the experiments.
39:59And he certifies this.
40:01Professor Havlin himself has confirmed this.
40:04Yet for the critics, this is not enough.
40:13What RIP's is claiming is hard scientific evidence for what amounts to a miracle.
40:22Such an extraordinary claim, they say, requires an extraordinary level of proof.
40:27In order to establish that a miracle happened, it is incumbent on the scientists to eliminate very thoroughly any other possible explanation.
40:44What was needed to convince the doubters was an experiment that nobody could question.
40:49In the late 1990s, a committee in Jerusalem tried to run just such an experiment.
41:05It included Professor Draw Bar-Natan, a man profoundly sceptical about the existence of the codes, and Professor RIP's.
41:20They agreed to set up an experiment which would search Genesis to see whether the names of the rabbis used by RIP's were encoded in close proximity to the names of the cities they'd lived in.
41:32After months of wrangling over how to compile the data, they agreed to run an experiment using two lists, one compiled according to guidelines favoured by RIP's, the other by the sceptics.
41:51Again, to minimise any danger of tuning, they handed over the actual selection of the names to independent experts.
41:59In fact, the committee members themselves, except for one, did not know who the experts were, and the experts did not know how the data they were collecting was to be used.
42:16So, they couldn't have introduced any bias, and we couldn't have influenced them in any way.
42:21Initially, both sides declared themselves happy with the procedure.
42:31It was meant to be the definitive Bible codes experiment, but the proceedings and results have never been published.
42:40We decided to re-run it.
42:52Horizon asked two senior academics at London's Imperial College, one of the world's top science universities, to re-run the analysis.
43:00Dr. Linda White is a statistician specialising in the design of experiments.
43:10Dr. Dan Moore is a mathematician and computer expert.
43:15We obtained a copy of the two lists used by the committee, and asked Professor Barna Tarn to confirm that they were the ones used.
43:32Now we're going to load the data for the experiment into the computer.
43:35We're going to drag across first the source for Genesis.
43:43There it is on the floppy disk, and we'll copy it across to the computer.
43:50And now we'll drag the RIPs list of words onto the computer.
43:57Now we'll run the experiment.
43:58The experiment was run on two computers, one for each list.
44:09First, the computers located the names of the rabbis and their cities.
44:15Then, they measured how tightly they clustered together.
44:19The so-called measure of compactness.
44:21Finally, they calculated whether this clustering was statistically significant.
44:28The original RIPs, rabbis and dates experiment had found the odds against those clusters being accidental were 62,500 to one.
44:38Would the committee's rabbis and cities experiment come up with a result as significant as this?
44:44After three hours, the results were ready.
44:55RIPs's original experiment gave us odds of 62,500 to one.
45:03When we did our experiment, we had two lists.
45:07We had the skeptics list, and we had the RIPs list.
45:16The odds for the skeptics list turned out to be two to one against, much smaller than RIPs's original odds.
45:25In very simple terms, this represents a chance of about one in three that the clustering is accidental.
45:32So, no evidence at all for hidden codes.
45:34When we come to the RIPs list, we get odds of two to three, which again, putting it simply, represents a chance of just over 50% that the clustering is accidental.
45:48So, when we look at these two together, there's absolutely no evidence at all, absolutely none, that there are hidden codes here.
45:55One experiment is never accepted as proof in science.
46:02However, the only Bible code experiment involving both sides of the debate had failed to show any evidence of their existence.
46:10But this, perhaps inevitably, is not the end of the story.
46:18Professor RIPs, even though he'd agreed to the procedure, argued that the independent experts employed to select the data, had made so many factual and procedural errors, the experiment was funded by the data.
46:37One other member of the committee agrees with him.
46:40One other member of the committee agrees with him.
46:44They did an unbelievably bad job.
46:49There was dozens of errors of various kinds of the data, most omissions of many places, etc.
46:59So, there was enough errors to account for the negative result.
47:09Yet, according to McKay, even the number of errors they claim are not sufficient to explain such a negative result.
47:17In order to produce results so negative as these experiments produced, the experts would have had to make not only a few mistakes here and there, they would have had to get most of the data wrong.
47:34And it's simply inconceivable that serious experts could make so many mistakes.
47:40The wrangling is likely to go on.
47:50RIPs and others have conducted new experiments which claim to provide further evidence for the existence of the codes.
47:59But none have been published in properly reviewed scientific journals.
48:05At the root of it all is one very simple problem.
48:09Nobody has yet devised an objective, scientifically rigorous way of investigating the codes that's universally accepted.
48:18In all the experiments, somebody has to make a subjective choice about what data to use.
48:26And then somebody else can say, you got it wrong.
48:33Yet the claims are so extraordinary, sceptics say the science has got to be absolutely rock solid.
48:39Until it is, they may feel justified in doubting whether science can ever be used to support the existence of the Bible codes.
48:54One man, however, has no doubts.
48:59Michael Drossnin is still determined to save the world from the coming Holocaust.
49:05And he's still hoping to catch the ear of George Bush.
49:30Next week, the tragedy of the space shuttle Columbia.
49:33Was it just a terrible accident or was someone to blame?
49:38Horizon asks, could those seven astronauts have been brought back to Earth alive?
49:42The
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