Seit einigen Jahren verbreiten Medien das irreführende Gerücht, Isaac Newton sei in Wahrheit ein fundamentalistischer Endzeitprophet gewesen, der vor dem bevorstehenden Ende der Welt gewarnt hätte:
So etwa in diesem Bericht des Daily Telegraph vom 22. Februar 2003:
Sir Isaac Newton, Britain’s greatest scientist, predicted the date of the end of the world - and it is only 57 years away. His theories about Armageddon have been unearthed by academics from little-known handwritten manuscripts in a library in Jerusalem.
The thousands of pages show Newton’s attempts to decode the Bible, which he believed contained God’s secret laws for the universe.
Newton, who was also a theologian and alchemist, predicted that the Second Coming of Christ would follow plagues and war and would precede a 1,000-year reign by the saints on earth - of which he would be one.
The most definitive date he set for the apocalypse, which he scribbled on a scrap of paper, was 2060. Newton’s fascination with the end of the world, which has been researched by a Canadian academic, Stephen Snobelen, is to be explored in a documentary, Newton: The Dark Heretic, on BBC2 next Saturday.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/02/22/newt22.xml
Jetzt sind Newtons apokalyptische Texte in einer Ausstellung der Hebräischen Universität in Jerusalem zu sehen:
Isaac Newton, einer der einflussreichsten Wissenschaftler der Welt, hat Anfang des 18. Jahrhunderts das Ende der Welt für das Jahr 2060 vorausgesagt. In der Ausstellung „Newtons Geheimnisse“ präsentiert die Hebräische Universität in Jerusalem einen Brief von 1704, in dem der Forscher das Weltende auf 1260 Jahre nach der Gründung des Heiligen Römischen Reiches (800 nach Christus) festsetzte. Entsprechende Schriften und Zeichnungen des vor 280 Jahren gestorbenen Forschers lagern bereits seit 1969 in den Archiven der israelischen Nationalbibliothek. Newton wertete für seine Vorhersage nach Angaben der Universität Bibelverse aus. http://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article956955/Isaac_Newton_sagte_Weltende_fuer_2060_voraus.html
Dabei ist es unablässig, Newtons (private) Überlegungen zu diesem Themenkomplex vor dem Hintergrund des von apokalyptischer Hysterie geprägten Englischen Bürgerkriegs zu verstehen. Darauf habe ich bereits vor vier Jahren aufmerksam gemacht:
Sir - I regret that your report (Feb 22) on Isaac Newton’s beliefs failed to put them into any historical context.
What is noteworthy about recent research is not that Newton was an “apocalyptic” thinker: all Protestant scholars in 17th-century Britain held such views. The apocalyptic consensus is not difficult to understand, given that any departure from the literal reading of the Book of Revelation was considered heresy.
Edmond Halley, who was confronted with this accusation in 1691, presented papers to the Royal Society on “the necessity of the world’s coming to an end”, to prove “that I am not guilty of asserting the eternity of the world”.
In Newton’s days nearly everyone believed in heavenly retribution and the catastrophic end of the world. The Church worked hard to scare an insubordinate flock, while political radicals prophesied cometary disaster and social upheaval.
Newton, in contrast, kept publicly quiet on the subject for most of his life. He endeavoured to discredit both camps by debunking their shared belief in impending doomsday.
In the unpublished manuscripts referred to, Newton did ponder the end of the world “in the year of the Lord 2060”, but stressed: “I mention this period not to assert it, but only to show that there is little reason to expect it earlier, and thereby to put a stop to the rash conjectures of interpreters who are frequently assigning the time of the end, and thereby bringing the sacred prophecies into discredit as often as their conjectures do not come to pass. It is not for us to know the times and seasons which God hath put in his own breast.”
By pushing back a tentative date for the apocalypse by more than 500 years (if not advocating an indefinite point in time), Newton assailed both an over-zealous orthodoxy and political radicals whose fanaticism had led to a century of mayhem and who threatened the stability of British society. Far from being a prophet of doom, Newton calculatingly established the foundations of the scientific age that turned terrifying comets into predictable objects and wild fear-mongering into dispassionate risk analysis.
Dr Benny Peiser, Liverpool John Moores University
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?xml=/opinion/2003/03/04/dt0402.xml