“A Time and Times and the Dividing of Time”: Isaac Newton, the Apocalypse, and 2060 A.D.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 22 February 2003 a story on the front-page of the Daily Telegraph announced that Isaac Newton had predicted that the world would end in 2060 A.D. That such an icon of rationality as the “scientist” Sir Isaac Newton, a thinker credited with founding modern mathematical physics, would venture into apocalyptic thought struck the media as both bizarrely anomalous and eminently newsworthy. During the week subsequent to the Daily Telegraph revelation, the story spread around the world in the print, radio, television and Internet media. This paper provides contextual and historical background detail on the story that was left out of these sensationalized reports. First, this paper considers the several likely reasons why this story generated so much interest. Second, it is argued that apocalyptic thought is a culturally- and intellectually-widespread phenomenon, affecting even modern science itself. Third, an account is given of Newton’s prophetic scheme, which not only reveals the logic of his apocalyptic chronology and the biblical hermeneutics he deployed, but also demonstrates that Newton was against date-setting and did not in fact believe the world was going to end in 2060 A.D.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".