Isaac Newton tried to keep his quest for the philosopher’s stone secret. The Beast had already come into power, and the total end of the world was only a few centuries away. The world, Newton believed, was already in the End Times. Newton wrote a whole paper arguing that the Church “gives laws to kings and nations as an Oracle and pretends to Infallibility, and that his dictates are binding to the whole world.” In it, he accused the Catholic church of preaching blasphemies by supporting “the invocation of the dead, and veneration of their images,” presumably referring to the veneration of saints. The Eleven-Horned Beast of Doomsday, which, according to the Book of Daniel, will rise up and speak blasphemies against the Lord and force the kings of the world to bow down before it, had already risen into power. Newton, in a long treatise on the apocalypse, claimed that some of Daniel’s prophecies had already come true. The beginning of the end, Newton believed, had already come. 7 The Catholic Church And The Beast Of The Apocalypse He was simply providing the world with a more rational, carefully calculated doomsday prophecy. He was merely correcting the “rash conjecture of fancifull men,” as he put it, who foolishly put the apocalypse on an earlier date. It’s all very strange, but the weirdest part is that Newton believed himself to be acting quite rationally. Whatever his logic, he concluded that the world would end in the year 2060-or possibly a little later but certainly not any sooner. The time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, recconing twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Calendar of the primitive year. Here, excerpted, is but a small part of it: He wrote a complicated proof that leaned heavily on the Books of Daniel and Revelations and that, to most people, is largely incomprehensible. And he was quite confident that he was right. He didn’t think there would be a metaphorical angel-he insisted an actual angel would be seen flying through the sky in the year 2060. Newton was quite literal about all of that. That would be the year that an angel would fly across the heavens declaring the Gospel, that the empire of Babylon would fall, and that Christ would return to usher in a new era of divinely inspired peace. The world was going to end, Isaac Newton declared in a treatise, in the year 2060. Mercury had certainly spread into his body: In the 1970s, a sample of his hair showed 40 times the normal levels of mercury.Ĩ 2060: The Year Newton Said The World Would End Some think this was the start of his madness, that the mercury in his body contaminated his brain and drove his insane. It’s quite likely that Newton tried one of his recipes himself, as he left a note complaining that the taste of mercury was “strong, sourish, ungrateful.” For years, then, he was cooped up in a lab, inhaling the toxic vapors from mercury. In his notes, he had a recipe written by other alchemists that called for “sophick mercury,” and he seems to have created some of his own. The key, Newton seems to have believed, was mercury. He studied every paper on alchemy he could find and ran test after test in a lab of his own making, struggling to create an elixir that would give him eternal life. For whatever reason, he fully and completely believed that the philosopher’s stone was real.

To Newton, this was no superstition-this was a genuine science. This, as some people believed in his time, was a mystical substance that could change base metals like lead into gold and could grant anyone who drank it eternal life. In the later years of his life, Isaac Newton began a wild search for the philosopher’s stone. Photo credit: Chemical Heritage Foundation

One of the many sins to which the young Newton confessed was “threatening my father and mother Smith to burne them and the house over them.”ĩ Isaac Newton And The Philosopher’s Stone His mother and his stepfather, Barnabas Smith, got the worst of his wrath. His sins became more open-ended: “striking many” and “wishing death and hoping it to some.” And then, it seems, he lost all sense of who he was against.

He asked God for forgiveness for punching his sister and, later, for going all out and beating a man named Arthur Storer. Some of them are bland, insignificant things like eating an apple while at church-but hidden among them are some that foreshadow the mental instability that was to plague him later in life. He studied the Bible with every bit as much passion as he poured into science.Īt the young age of 20, while his sanity was still well intact, Newton sat down and wrote a list of his 57 most grievous sins as his way of begging for forgiveness. Photo credit: Barrington Bramley/Godfrey Kneller

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