Javier Jiménez
Senior WriterHead of science, health, and environment at Xataka. Methodologist turned communicator, I write about science, ideas and social change.
Around 1665, the bubonic plague arrived in London on a cotton ship from Amsterdam. In the following years, more than 100,000 people would die across the country due to overcrowding, poor sanitation, hunger, and an abundance of rats. In August, the Great Plague reached Cambridge, forcing the university to close.
During this time, a very young Isaac Newton had to return to Woolsthorpe Manor, the family home in Lincolnshire on the eastern coast of England. According to a possibly apocryphal tale, he sat under one of the three apple trees on the estate, and the fall of an apple inspired his theory of gravity.
No one can be certain if the supposed trauma caused by the falling apple had any effect on the last stage of his life.
Sir Isaac Newton wasn’t just an ordinary person. Newton was an intellectual giant. According to Isaac Asimov, he had the greatest scientific brain the world has ever known. Meanwhile, Albert Einstein referred to him as the man responsible for “perhaps the greatest advance in thought that a single individual was ever privileged to make.” Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph reads, “Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night. God said ‘Let Newton be!’ and all was light.”
However, Newton was also a complicated man, particularly after he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1693. One of the more controversial periods of his life was his time at England’s Royal Mint, which was marked by tortures, hangings, and the punishment of counterfeiters. A brief review of his personal life and friendships provides some insight into his character.
What’s particularly interesting is Newton’s passion for the Bible. It’s estimated that more than half of what he wrote focused on theology and alchemy. As a mathematician, one of his chief concerns was the end of the world.
The end of the world? Following the conclusion of the English Civil War, religious debates were intense, and discussions about the end of the world were common. However, Newton believed that many people were misinterpreting the signs.
He analyzed biblical texts, particularly the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelation, and concluded that people were exaggerating the proximity of the end of the world.
Did Newton provide a specific date? In a way, he did. Newton identified the year 800 A.D. as the moment when the Church entered a period of “general apostasy,” given that it’s a key date in these texts. From this, he deduced that there was no reason to expect the Apocalypse before 1260 years had passed.
According to Newton’s predictions, we’re relatively safe until 2060. He said, “It may end later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner.”
Did he really believe the world was going to end? Stephen Snobelen, a professor at King’s College University in Halifax in Canada, has studied this topic. According to him, Newton didn’t interpret the concept of the end of the world in a literal sense.
“For Newton, 2060 A.D. would be more like a new beginning. It would be the end of an old age, and the beginning of a new era–the era Jews refer to the Messianic era and the era premillenarian Christians term the Millennium or Kingdom of God,” Snobelen pointed out.
This perspective doesn’t provide a compelling reason to believe that the Apocalypse is imminent. However, knowing how close humanity is to this significant date can invite some people to make the most of their time.
Image | Wellcome Collection (CC BY 4.0)
Related | The End of the Universe: What Science Tells Us About the Inevitable Fate of the Cosmos
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