Interesting Snippets

As much as today’s scientists celebrate Newton, their reverence is matched by that of a very different group: the Seventh-Day Adventist Church… In 1936, a large cache of Newton’s personal papers — material that he had never published and in some cases had kept quite secret — were offered for sale by Sotheby’s, and many of them were bought by the great economist John Maynard Keynes. When he got the chance to read what he had purchased, Keynes was surprised and at times appalled. He had known about Newton’s interest in alchemy, and may even have been aware that Newton believed Scripture to be full of mathematical codes — for instance, in the proportions decreed for the construction of Solomon’s Temple. But he was not quite prepared for the great man’s obsession with biblical prophecy, especially the book of Daniel, a close reading of which had convinced Newton that the world would end in 2060.