As America slept, digital clocks in the small hours of this morning moved inexorably toward an uncanny moment of alignment, 1-2-3-4-5-6:
01:02:03 on 04/05/06.
Eerie? Transcendental? A harbinger of fire and brimstone?
Maybe all three, to some extent. Certainly the once-every-century moment was heavily bruited about in e-mail messages yesterday.
Daniel Goroff, a mathematics professor on leave from Harvard, chuckled a bit when asked about it.
''We are pattern seekers and we seek meaning in patterns,'' said Dr. Goroff, who is also dean of faculty at Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, Calif. ''But in order to do that, our brains notice a lot of things that are not meaningful.''
Numerologists, for the most part, agree. Daniel Hardt, founder of the Life Path Numerology Center in Indianapolis, said the numbers 1 through 6 add up to 21 and when 21 is ''reduced,'' or added together, it equals 3, a number signifying communication.
Which means? Mr. Hardt, a hearing-aid salesman turned numerologist, said, ''I don't see much.''
Judith Gabriel, a roulette-dealer-turned-numerologist in Las Vegas, was blunter. ''There's nothing in particular there whatsoever,'' she said.
Still, Rose Welsh, an art-gallery-owner-turned-numerologist in TriBeCa, sees a growing spirituality.
Why? The number 6 signifies the individual, she said, while the next number, 7, signifies evolution.
Of course, the last time there was a big buzz about numbers was the Y2K question that accompanied the approach of the year 2000, stirring fears of monster computer crashes and predictions of disaster, or even of the Second Coming.
Stephen Jay Gould, writing in his book ''Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown,'' noted that 2000 was not two millennia after Jesus' birth. He had to have been born in the year 4 B.C., when King Herod was still alive. Nothing miraculous happened 2,000 years later, in 1996, Mr. Gould said, with the possible exception of the Yankees winning the World Series in six games after losing the first two.
It is not clear yet whether something happened this morning. But something earthshaking did happen a hundred years ago, on April 5, 1906.
On its front page the following day, The New York Times carried a five-paragraph dispatch from Italy with the following headline:
''Vesuvius Causes Terror -- Loud Detonations and Frequent Earthquakes -- Villagers Flee.''
Correction: June 21, 2006, Wednesday An article on April 5 about the date 04/05/06 -- a once-in-a-century alignment -- referred erroneously, in discussing other dates of numerical interest, to calculations by the evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould in his 1997 book ''Questioning the Millennium: A Rationalist's Guide to a Precisely Arbitrary Countdown.'' Mr. Gould, in analyzing a theory that Jesus was actually born in 4 B.C. and that the world would end 2,000 years after Jesus's birth, concluded that the 2,000-year mark would arrive in 1997 -- not 1996. (There was no year zero.) A reader reported the error at the time, but his e-mail was misdirected at The Times.