Issac Newton theorized that the world will end in the year 2060

Sir Isaac Newton is a pretty famous scientist. We all know him as the man who established the laws of gravity and is the father of modern physics and calculus. However, he also tried to mathematically predict the end of the world. His prediction? We’ve got until 2060. That’s right, less than 40 years left. 

Isaac Newton Predicted The World Will End In 2060

To say Isaac Newton was obsessed with science would be an understatement. Kind of a mad professor, he was known to risk his own eyesight to perform experiments. These included sticking a needle in his eye to learn more about the nature of light, as well as studying the effects of a solar eclipse on our eyes by staring into one for a long time. A little bit crazy? It seems so. But also a definitive genius? This goes uncontested.

Though he is celebrated for his work in the world of mathematics, his first love was truly alchemy. He studied it daily and was trying to create something sort of like a philosopher’s stone from Harry Potter, which could turn things into gold or multiply gold. He also used his studies to try and predict when the world would end. According to his predictions, the world as we know it will come to a raging and fiery end in the year 2060. (1)

Why 2060?

Newton extensively studied biblical and religious texts. He used those texts, along with mathematics, to make a prediction as to when the world would end, or “when the kingdom of God would prevail on Earth”. He referred to it as a reset, rather than the world ending. Either way, his predictions don’t appear to be something that will be overly enjoyable for any humans living on Earth during that time.

“Newton spent a great deal of time with the study of religious texts and tried to build a chronology of past events to get all those stories sorted and into . . . Order,” said Florian Freistetter in his book Isaac Newton: The Asshole Who Reinvented The Universe. “He was convinced that future events were already ordained by God. From the Bible, Newton extracted some ‘prophetic’ time periods. For him, 2060 [would be] a new beginning; maybe accompanied by war and catastrophes but ultimately the start of a new divine era.”

Newton died in March 1727. Naturally, for him, predicting that the world would end nearly 300 years later didn’t seem like such a big deal. After all, at the time it was a long way off! Now, however, we are less than 40 years from this supposed date. Certainly, it has given a few people cause for concern.

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Not The First Doomsday Predictions

We all know that Isaac Newton is not the first person or group of people to predict the end of days. For example, there was Y2K in 1999, when there was a large group of people who believed that the world would surely end the moment the clock struck midnight, marking the end of the 1900’s and the beginning of the 2000’s. As we can see, this was incorrect. The next prediction-gone-wrong was that of the Mayans. The Mayan calendar, which had been largely accurate up until this point, stopped in 2012. This made many people believe that the Mayans were predicting that the world would end then. Again, it clearly did not. Now it is largely believed that the Mayan calendar probably ended because their civilization – and those writing the calendar – ended. Also perhaps they just got tired. Who knows. Then of course there is Nostrodamus, who apparently predicted all sorts of things.

The difference between those predictions and that of Isaac Newton, however, is that those predictions were made based on beliefs. Newton’s, however, was made based on science and mathematics. He made the prediction in 1704. He wrote the prediction on seemingly a scrap piece of paper, as he did many of the results of his experiments and his research. Most of those scraps were lost over time. However, not all were and there are some who wonder if this one was not lost for a reason. (2)

The Basis of His Theory

Isaac Newton’s theory is based on the Bible’s book of Daniel. He thinks doomsday would be exactly 1260 years after the formation of the Holy Roman Empire. Newton also said that the world would only end after the Jews were returned to the Holy Lands. This already happened in 1948 after the formation of Israel. He has also said that though the end could happen later, it certainly won’t happen before 2060. (3)

Is any of this accurate? Really, who knows? Still, part of his prediction is based on the Bible. This means that in order to believe Newton’s prediction, you also have to have some level of belief in what is written there. So while we may never truly know when the world will end, we should perhaps instead focus on living well and improving the world while we still have it.

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