Newton set 2060 for end of world

Sir Isaac Newton, Britain's greatest scientist, predicted the date of the end of the world - and it is only 57 years away. His theories about Armageddon have been unearthed by academics from little-known handwritten manuscripts in a library in Jerusalem. The thousands of pages show Newton's attempts to decode the Bible, which he believed contained God's secret laws for the universe.

Newton, who was also a theologian and alchemist, predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would follow plagues and war and would precede a 1,000-year reign by the saints on earth - of which he would be one. The most definitive date he set for the apocalypse, which he scribbled on a scrap of paper, was 2060.

Newton's fascination with the end of the world, which has been researched by a Canadian academic, Stephen Snobelen, is to be explored in a documentary, Newton: The Dark Heretic, on BBC2 next Saturday. "What has been coming out over the past 10 years is what an apocalyptic thinker Newton was," Malcolm Neaum, the producer, said. "He spent something like 50 years and wrote 4,500 pages trying to predict when the end of the world was coming. But until now it was not known that he ever wrote down a final figure. He was very reluctant to do so."

Thousands of Newton's papers, which had lain in a trunk in the house of the Earl of Portsmouth for 250 years, were sold by Sotheby's in the late 1930s. John Maynard Keynes, the economist, bought many of the texts on alchemy and theology. But much of the material went to an eccentric collector, Abraham Yahuda, and was stored in the Hebrew National Library. It was among these documents that the date was found.

-- Jonathan Petre, Religion Correspondent, 22/02/2003

Sir - I regret that your report (Feb 22) on Isaac Newton's beliefs failed to put them into any historical context.

What is noteworthy about recent research is not that Newton was an "apocalyptic" thinker: all Protestant scholars in 17th-century Britain held such views. The apocalyptic consensus is not difficult to understand, given that any departure from the literal reading of the Book of Revelation was considered heresy.

Edmond Halley, who was confronted with this accusation in 1691, presented papers to the Royal Society on "the necessity of the world's coming to an end", to prove "that I am not guilty of asserting the eternity of the world". In Newton's days nearly everyone believed in heavenly retribution and the catastrophic end of the world. The Church worked hard to scare an insubordinate flock, while political radicals prophesied cometary disaster and social upheaval.

Newton, in contrast, kept publicly quiet on the subject for most of his life. He endeavoured to discredit both camps by debunking their shared belief in impending doomsday. In the unpublished manuscripts referred to, Newton did ponder the end of the world "in the year of the Lord 2060", but stressed: "I mention this period not to assert it, but only to show that there is little reason to expect it earlier, and thereby to put a stop to the rash conjectures of interpreters who are frequently assigning the time of the end, and thereby bringing the sacred prophecies into discredit as often as their conjectures do not come to pass. It is not for us to know the times and seasons which God hath put in his own breast."

By pushing back a tentative date for the apocalypse by more than 500 years (if not advocating an indefinite point in time), Newton assailed both an over-zealous orthodoxy and political radicals whose fanaticism had led to a century of mayhem and who threatened the stability of British society. Far from being a prophet of doom, Newton calculatingly established the foundations of the scientific age that turned terrifying comets into predictable objects and wild fear-mongering into dispassionate risk analysis.

-- Dr Benny Peiser, John Moores University, Liverpool, 4th March 2003