Off-Topic - The End Is Nigh! Well, In 57 Years. Or Something.

by , 12:00 PM EST, February 24th, 2003

[Note: This has almost nothing to do with Apple or the Mac, unless you want to hear some bad jokes about Newton getting hit in the head with an Apple, or about Apple's Newton PDA. In the meanwhile, we thought this interesting enough for an off-topic story.]

If you had some papers written by Sir Isaac Newton laying around, you'd read them, wouldn't you? Apparently the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem didn't. A Canadian researcher studying a huge cache of papers from Sir Isaac has found a handwritten document. In that document, the father of modern physics penned the year 2060 for his prediction as to when the world would be coming to an end. He supposedly got this number after studying the Bible for many years.

The papers themselves were part of a collection bought in England in the 1930s, and later donated to the Jewish National Library. The Library has allowed scholars to study the documents, but very little study has actually been done until now. The BBC will be airing a TV show which will include specific information on Sir Isaac's apocalyptic prognostications. From Canada TV:

Sir Isaac Newton predicted the world would come to an end 57 years from now, a TV network says, based on a document unearthed from a Jerusalem archive by a Canadian researcher.

Newton's sombre prediction is part of the documentary Newton: The Dark Heretic. In a statement promoting the program, to be aired March 1, the British Broadcasting Corp. said it will show a handwritten Newton document predicting the end of the world in 2060, according to calculations he made based on the Bible.

The BBC said the document was found in a Newton collection in the Jewish National Library in Jerusalem.

You can read the full article at Canada TV's Web site. A related story at The Age adds more:

"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."

Check out both stories for additional information.

The Mac Observer Spin:

In other news, Nostradomas predicted that the year 2060 would be when Motorola would release the mythical G5. Coincidence? We think not.

Seriously though, what the world hardly needs right now is a hefty dose of doomsday worries. Hopefully that won't actually be the case, but if there is anything that the world can obsess on more than what Apple is going to be doing at the next Macworld, it's whether or not the world is going to end. Sir Isaac Newton has a certain amount of credibility not found in most end-of-the-world fortune tellers, and it will be interesting to see how people react to this bit of "news."

Canada TV