Isaac Newton's Views of "the Last Days"

Isaac Newton’s Views of R= 20;the Last Days”

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

&nbs= p; Many of Newton’s comments were considered quite shocking by the political establishment of h= is time. Even after his genius was well established, he had to be very careful about what he said, just to stay alive. It is am= using to look back and see how the “Evil Captain Hooke” tried to debunk him, using the same style of antiscientific debunking we se= e 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 g= ot 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 towar= d a new model of the strong nuclear forces, different from the usual quark mode= l, based in part on a paper by Julian Schwinger in= Science magazine. This paper was l= argely ignored – not refuted or tested, just disregarded – by the well-managed bureaucracies of physics in the US, but evaluated in detail a= cross 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 SchwingerR= 17;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 clas= sic experiments on optics were also totally ignored until King Charles II was entertained by a toy telescope that Newton invented in later years.

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

&nbs= p; 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 – lik= e 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 ̶= 0;color vision.”) These historians clearly knew about Traditional Alchemy, th= e effort to convert lead into gold, well-funded by princes and kings who may have kn= own (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, whi= le 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 al= one by himself in participating in that stream. (In fairness, they did mention wha= t Newton said about= his practice of meditation, and his relations with Locke.)

&nbs= p; Having spent many years of my life trying to “fight tigers,” maybe I f= ind it easier to develop a kind of empathic respect for the greatest “tig= er 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.

&nbs= p; 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?

&nbs= p; 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, exc= ept 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 numer= ical symbols in that way, because they lead to confusion very easily that way, a= nd 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 al= so used digits as symbols for other things, in a way that we have mostly outgr= own.)

&nbs= p; I cannot say more about the thinking which led Newton to his prediction about the last days, because I have not read the Jerusalem documen= ts and have not even tried to probe this stream of his thought. But given the powe= r of his mind and his intuition, I would not immediately discount it.

&nbs= p; 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 &= #8220;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 ab= out the Bible without seeming to have read it! And how they assume that the message should have nothing to do with actual reality.

&nbs= p; But of course, if this happens, 2060 will not truly be the “last daysR= 21; 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 empiric= al 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 the= re are times when our only choices are to grow or to die. The spiritual dimens= ion of growth is very difficult and full of pitfalls, just as nuclear technolog= y 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 re= al life in its proper realm. We as humans have this responsibility; laws and rulers cannot be relied on to do it all themselves.