Isaac Newton’s Views of “the
Last Days”

The NOVA video on Isaac Newton can easily be found in any
good public library, and is well worth watching.

Many
of Newton’s
comments were considered quite shocking by the political establishment of his
time. Even after his genius was well established, he had to be very careful
about what he said, just to stay alive. It is amusing to
look back and see how the “Evil Captain Hooke”
tried to debunk him, using the same style of antiscientific debunking we see so
often today. In the past century, Albert Einstein, Julian Schwinger
and Ilya Prigogine also
proposed powerful visions which were dismissed too lightly by people who did
not think hard enough about what they might be missing. In Einstein’s
case, people at Harvard in the 1970’s often said “Oh, he just got
old. He must have been a senile old man.” But, on my physics page, I argue why and
how Einstein may have been right after all. The Einstein story points toward a
new model of the strong nuclear forces, different from the usual quark model,
based in part on a paper by Julian Schwinger in Science magazine. This paper was largely
ignored – not refuted or tested, just disregarded – by the
well-managed bureaucracies of physics in the US, but evaluated in detail across
a variety of experiments analyzed by Sawada of Japan. Sawada found that the decisive
empirical comparison of Schwinger’s model
versus the quark model decisively favors Schwinger’s
model – but who would pay attention to mere experiments when they
contradict official theology and do not come from the Vatican? The
Nova story reports how Newton’s classic
experiments on optics were also totally ignored until King Charles II was
entertained by a toy telescope that Newton
invented in later years.

What
do strong nuclear forces have to do with the “Last Days?” A lot, but for now I will return to Newton.

The
Nova story on Newton
has strengths and weaknesses similar to those of Mackey’s History of
Freemasonry. It shows enormous honesty of spirit and dedication – like a
brilliant movie critic who can only see in black and white.

(The diligent scholars who produced the shariyah
were also quite sincere and diligent – but limited by a lack of “color
vision.”) These historians clearly knew about Traditional Alchemy, the effort
to convert lead into gold, well-funded by princes and kings who may have known
(or paid attention to) little else. They knew about Theology as practiced by
the Catholic Church. They knew that Newton
was somehow interested in both of these embarrassing things. They held their
noses very tight as they approached these parts of his life… and, while holding
their noses, missed something. They missed the entire huge world of “spiritual
alchemy,” which was a huge stream of thought at the time. Newton was not alone by
himself in participating in that stream. (In fairness, they did mention what Newton said about his
practice of meditation, and his relations with Locke.)

Having
spent many years of my life trying to “fight tigers,” maybe I find
it easier to develop a kind of empathic respect for the greatest “tiger
fighters” of all time. It is all too easy for “Monday morning
quarterbacks” to make clever little remarks that do not do justice to the
great struggle for truth and what it requires.

In
Nova, they reported old documents recently unearthed in Jerusalem,
showing that Newton
predicted that the events in the Book of Revelation would come to a head in the
year 2060. What do we make of this?

Was
it all a matter of numerology? Like most scientists, I see little reason to pay
much attention at all to numerology. Nothing in my personal experience gives
any reason for hope that it would reveal any useful information at all, except
in the case where individual people use numerical symbols within their own
minds to communicate with themselves. I for one would not want to use numerical
symbols in that way, because they lead to confusion very easily that way, and
there are better symbols available to the mind. Yet Isaac Newton had his own
way of thinking and communicating with himself, and perhaps he had it under
control to some extent. (The early Pythagoreans and the later cabbalists also
used digits as symbols for other things, in a way that we have mostly outgrown.)

I
cannot say more about the thinking which led Newton
to his prediction about the last days, because I have not read the Jerusalem documents and
have not even tried to probe this stream of his thought. But given the power of
his mind and his intuition, I would not immediately discount it.

In
fact, the year 2060 is a plausible time for some of the events portrayed in the
book of Revelations. By that time, we might indeed have built the kind of “ark”
we have been calling for: a man-made vehicle to take us to “cities in the
heavens” that we indeed can build. There are nasty hateful preachers who
would immediately call this blasphemy. How could we even think about mere
humans building an ark? It is strange indeed how often those people talk about
the Bible without seeming to have read it! And how they
assume that the message should have nothing to do with actual reality.

But
of course, if this happens, 2060 will not truly be the “last days”
for humanity. That is not the prediction. Rather, it would be the start of “new
worlds” – if we get that far. And perhaps there will indeed be “new
rays” as well, new force fields and new sources of energy – if we
return to re-examining the foundations of physics, and listening to empirical
data, and not get lost in imaginary superstring epicycles or kill ourselves
with the new toys which we need. The new toys are indeed dangerous, but there
are times when our only choices are to grow or to die. The spiritual dimension
of growth is very difficult and full of pitfalls, just as nuclear technology is.
Like nuclear technology, it needs to be strictly pruned away from the wrong
kinds of trespasses. But it also needs to be stimulated more strongly to real
life in its proper realm. We as humans have this responsibility; laws and
rulers cannot be relied on to do it all themselves.