Tired of people talking about the end of the world without knowing, Newton decided to calculate it. And he explained it in a letter of 1704
By 1665 the bubonic plague arrived in London in a cotton ship from Amsterdam. In the following years, between overcrowding, dirt, hunger and rats, they would die More than one hundred thousand people In the country. In August, the great plague arrived in Cambridge and forced the university to close. It was then that a very young Isaac Newton had to return to Woolshorpe Manor, the family home. Over there, According to a probably fraudulent traditionsat down one of the three apple trees of the farm and the blow of one of the fruits brought to mind the theory of gravity. We do not know if the craniocerebral trauma produced by the happy apple was also responsible for everything that came in the last part of his life. Sir Isaac Newton was not any. On the one hand, Newton was, in fact, an intellectual giant. “The greatest scientific brain that the world has known,” According to Asimov; the person responsible for that “perhaps the greatest advance of thought that a single individual has ever done”, According to Albert Einstein. “Nature and its laws were hidden at night; God said ‘that Newton’ becomes and made the light,” he says Alexander Pope’s famous epitaph. On the other, it was someone complicated – especially after The nervous breakdown he suffered in 1693. The most controversial example is its passage through the house of La Moneda de England (a stage of your life Full of torture, hanging and dismembered falsifiers); However, a brief review of his personal life and friendship gives good account of it. But what interests us today is that he was passionate about the Bible. It is estimated that more than half of what Newton wrote It had to do with theology and alchemy; And, as a good mathematician, one of the themes that worried him most was the end of the world. The end of the world? Yes, at that time (remember that The English revolution had just “finished”) Religious debates were in the flower. And the end of the world was a usual issue in public conversation. But Newton was convinced that people did it wrong. Lincolnshire’s genius analyzed the biblical text (And, specifically, Daniel’s book and the Apocalypse) and concluded that people were exaggerating the closeness of the end of the world. And gave a date? Yes and no. As Newton seems to identify the year 800 d. C. as the moment when the Church entered the “great apostasy.” This is a key date in the texts and, from there, he deduced that there was no reason to think that before 1260 years the apocalypse arrived. That means that We are relatively safe until 2060. Because, as he said “he may end later, but I don’t see any reason for him to end before.” But did he really think he was going to end the world? According to Stephen Snobelen, professor at the King’s College University of Halifax (Nueva Scotia) that has studied the matterNewton did not believe that the world would end in a literal sense. “For Newton, 2060 AD would be rather a new beginning. It would be the end of an ancient era, and the beginning of a new era: the era to which the Jews refer as the messianic era and the era to which Christians premillennials call the millennium or kingdom of God “, Snobelen defended. Obviously, we are not faced with weight to think that the apocalypse is just around the corner. But knowing The close we are from the end of the worldwe can take all this as an invitation to take advantage of the moment. Image | Godfrey Kneller In Xataka | When Newton reached the fundamental laws of physics there was already a sign that said “Leonardo was here”
