Was Michael Jackson's hair catching fire in a Pepsi ad the exact mid-point of his life?

Michael Jackson was born on the 28th of August 1958 and he passed away on the 25th of June in the year 2009. And between those two points in time there were 18,562 days. Now a lot, a lot happened, well, a lot happened in those days. Not going near that in this video. What we're going to discuss is the day where Michael Jackson's hair caught fire while filming a Pepsi commercial. And there is a theory online. Is it a conspiracy theory? Is it true? We'll find out that when his hair caught on fire it was the exact midpoint exactly of his life. And so that's what we're going to look at today. Was Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire during a Pepsi ad There is a YouTube channel called Bobby Fingers where Bobby makes unnecessarily good dioramas of unusual moments in recent popular history. And Bobby was working on a video about the moment Michael Jackson's hair caught fire during a Pepsi ad. And they came across this fact online that it was the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. And they thought that might be a good opportunity for like a little joke, a little diversion during the video. And Bobby is actually a friend of a friend. And so Bobby reached out to me and said, do I know any mathematicians where it would be funny, like a super serious overqualified mathematician, where he could ask them in the video if it was the midpoint of Michael Jackson's life and they could be comically dismissive. And I was like, yes. And I hooked him up with a friend of mine, David Spiegelhalter, who a professor and a sir, as well as being an amazing human being. And I think it's a very funny joke. It's in the video. I'll link to it below. You can check it out. But as well as being a mathematician fixer, I also got thinking, well, is it true? Is it right? And so I ran the numbers myself and I have checked. Is this a true fact? That's not to scale. Not to scale. There we go. Not to scale. Problem solved. All right, there we go. Okay, so here's what we've got. We've got the day when Michael Jackson was born, 28th of August, 1958. Then some time passes. Specifically, I'm going to put in 9,280 days. That's our passing of time there. Then there's the day where Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire. That's the 27th of January. And I've got the day before. That's the 26th of January. Let's pop them in. Then a bunch more time passes. It's another 9,280 days over here, before finally he dies on the 25th of June. Now, this is the full 18,562 days, but now we've got 9,280. These two days, the next 9,280. And this is the day where his hair caught on fire. At a resolution of days, because they're an even number of them, there's no middle day of Michael Jackson's life. The midpoint is between these two days here. Midnight before his hair catches on fire the next day. If we want to get down to an actual exact central point with a bit more resolution, we have to factor in the time he was born and the time he died. We know when he died it was 2,26 in the afternoon over here on the 25th of June. So I'm going to label that at that point there on his life timeline. I appreciate in America you don't often use 24-hour time, but it makes life a lot easier to just have 24 hours in the day and then hours and minutes. So that's 2,26 in the afternoon. Now we do not know when he was born, when of the date, but we don't know the time. So all we know is Michael Jackson was born at a time that was declared to be the 28th of August 1958 in, uh, in Gary, Indiana. So that means the earliest he could have been born would have been right on the previous midnight, which I'm going to label as zero. I appreciate that might upset some people. And the latest he could have been born was right on the other midnight. So I'm going to label this 2,400, which is going to annoy even more people. I'm just saying if you ignore the exact crossover fraction of a fraction of a second, Michael Jackson was But when did his hair catch fire? His hair caught fire at night. It's the best I've got. I found a contemporary article from the day after this was on the 28th of January when Michael Jackson was released from hospital. And it says that his hair caught fire while filming the Pepsi commercial the night of the 27th. And most reporting at the time says it was the sixth take of him performing in front of a very large audience. So best we know is it was nighttime or at a minimum very late in the day. We now have to factor in time zones. It's always time zone. So these two dates both happened to Michael Jackson in LA, in California, whereas this one was Gary, Indiana. That's a different time zone. So these times are not the same time zone as these times. In fact, these times aren't even the same time zone because this was LA during the winter when there's no daylight saving time. This was LA in the summer and there was daylight saving time. So I'm going to convert everything to non-daylight saving standard Pacific time, which means we have to move back an hour. So he didn't die at 2.26 in the afternoon. If you convert that over to Pacific time, he died an hour earlier. It was actually 1.26 in the afternoon. And this, this gets complicated. So here's the problem. 1958 was in the small window of time where all of Indiana had declared that the official time zone was going to be central standard time. However, there was a condition where individual cities or communities could switch to daylight saving time, effectively moving an hour onto eastern standard time if they wanted to, only during the summer months. They were not allowed to do that in the winter months. And Michael Jackson was born during the summer. So if Gary, Indiana stayed with the rest of the state on central time, we can move this back to be between 10 p.m. and between 10 p.m. Oh, that's going to be the day before. Hang on. Technically, if we bump that back, the two hour time zone change. Let me grab one more. That's now we've rolled over just, there we are. I'll pop it there. Okay. Just back into the, it's the wrong one. I've had the wrong date up. I've had the wrong date up, everyone. I'm very sorry. Let me just, he was born on the 29th. That should be over there. This is what I get for putting my, preparing my props in advance. And I'll put that one over there. I'd like to say hello to everyone who noticed that and has already complained in the comments before watching this far into the video. I'm a numbers guy, not a history guy. I'm going to get so many comments about that. But look, now all works. Double check. This is a hundred percent accurate. I've done a lot of calculations here. Michael Jackson was born if Indiana was on central time, sometime between 10 p.m. We're talking LA time now on the 28th of August through to 10 p.m. on the 29th of August, because that would have been midnight to midnight local time, unless they happen to be on eastern time. And there is a reference on timeanddate.com suggesting they might have been, but that would be another hour back. So I'm not going to worry about that for now. His hair then caught on fire at night on this day in LA normal time. And then he died at 1.26 in the afternoon, which was locally 2.26 in the afternoon because they're on daylight saving time on the 25th of June, 2009. I'm pretty sure all that's correct. Now we just have to work out. Well, you know what? We've kind of got two bounds here. We've got an upper and lower bound. Let's work out the midpoint from the upper bound first. We want the exact center point between the latest he could have been born and the time he died. To find the midpoint, I'm just going to label every single interval between the beginning of Michael Jackson and the end. So first of all, we have at least two hours kind of spare time on the day he was born. So that's the maximum amount of, the latest he could be born was 10 p.m LA time. We got two hours. Then we have the 9,280 days, which is the same on both. So I'm going to kind of ignore those. We've actually got 24 hours here. So if we factor in all of that day, 24 hours, the other end after this 9,280 days, we've then got 13.4333 hours. I've just turned 26 minutes into a fraction of an hour. If we divide this day out, we don't know where the line is. Somewhere in here is the midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. So I'm going to label, first of all, there are t hours up until the exact midpoint. And then after that, there are 24 minus t hours. And we can solve for t, because if you add all of these together, it should equal the sum of all of these. So 2 plus 24 plus t equals 24 minus t plus 13.433. And actually we can just get the 24's cancel out. t equals the difference between the two numbers divided by 2, which if you crunch it through, and I have, it's 5.71667 hours, which as a time is 5.43 in the morning. So that is the absolute latest that Michael Jackson's midpoint of his life could have been. Some of you might have noticed a different way. I could have worked that out. Some of you may have done this while you're watching the video. So you see here we've got the difference between the two times divided by 2. That kind of gives it away, because if we didn't have these sticky out bits, the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life would be right on midnight here. And then these drag it one way or the other, and this one's bigger, so it's going to go that way. How much that way? Half the difference, because you've got two hours here, you can compensate with the two there, you've got the difference, and then because, you know, it's the midpoint, you half it, and you end up there. So I could have worked it out that way. I thought, bizarrely, this kind of algebraic way, while the computation's a bit harder, it's easier to follow the logic. But for some people that's a more logical way of doing it. It's maths. There's several different ways to do anything, and different people find different ones more intuitive than other options. But in whatever the case is, the latest the midpoint could be is 5.43 in the morning. The earliest it could have been, well, we just do this exactly the same process, but we use this time instead of this time, which is just 24 hours earlier. And by the logic we ended up with here, you can actually just move this one back 12 hours, so it's over there. It's 5.43 in the afternoon. Hypothetically, if Gary Indiana had been on Daylight Saving Time when Michael Jackson was born, that would move both of these back another hour, which would drag both of these back by half an hour. So this is still the absolute latest it could have been. Potentially, it was half an hour earlier. But I think we can all agree that before 6 in the morning would not have been described by the newspapers as night. That would be early morning or night of the previous day. So I think we can comprehensively say no. The moment Michael Jackson's hair caught on fire was not the exact midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. However, we can also say that possibly the day in which Michael Jackson's hair caught fire during the Pepsi ad was the same day that contained what could have been the midpoint of Michael Jackson's life. That's not as catchy, is it? And actually, we forgot about the 28th of August because now we've gone for the one time zone. Everything is LA time across Michael Jackson's lifetime. Another day has entered the chat. Michael Jackson has now lived for an odd number of days. And if you've got an odd number of days, there is a middle day. It's the 26th of January. So the 26th of January is actually the central day of Michael Jackson's lifetime, not the 27th of January. I've blown this whole thing wide open. In conclusion, was Michael Jackson's hair catching on fire during the Pepsi ad the exact midpoint of his life? No. Was it on the day that was the midday of his life? Also no. Could you say it occurred on the same day where the exact midpoint of his life also occurred? Well, yes. But statistically, it's more likely to have been the day before than the day where his hair caught on fire. So it's so close. And bear in mind that Michael Jackson did a lot of things in their life. And there's a lot of different fractions we could have looked at. I, of course, looked up some other fractions. And it turns out the day when Lisa Marie Presley filed for divorce from Michael Jackson in 1996 was pretty much exactly two eighths of the way through Michael Jackson's life. There's a lot of fractions is what I'm trying to say. There's a lot of celebrities. These things are going to line up by accident occasionally. And in this case, didn't even line up. So there you are. Not true. Do check out Bobby Finger's video about the Michael Jackson diorama. It's absolutely incredible. I will link to that below. Huge thanks to everyone who watches and supports these videos. That's absolutely amazing of you. I actually put this video out a little bit early on Patreon. There you are. Join Patreon if you want to see that. Bobby puts his out a day earlier on Patreon because he takes his entire diorama and buries it somewhere in the world. And the first person to find it gets to keep it. And so that extra one day rolling start for his Patreon supporters makes a big difference. Whereas for me, I mean, I guess I could bury this somewhere. You know what? What I'm going to do is just take all the bits of paper and the string and carry them with me. And the first person to stop me and say, hey, can I have the Michael Jackson conspiracy pinup board, board and pins, not included, just the up. That's all you get. You get all this paper in the string. I will give it to him. There you are. Hunt me down. Don't hunt me. Find me. I'll give you this. Thanks for watching.