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Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

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Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#21

Post by Tossrock »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #7

Complaints about the headline aside, it is the perfect sort of doomsday prophecy story. It is far enough away that the people who pulled it out of Newton's writing will be forgotten, its near enough that the reader could imagine being alive at that time and wondering what would happen. Erich von Däniken exploited this in his "Ancient Astronauts" stuff, predicting the Mayan's called it with a 2012 extinction event (wh…

Credibility isn't necessarily lost over failed doomsday predictions, at least among the faithful - "When Prophecy Fails" is the classic example of this. And these people tend not to have any credibility outside the faithful to begin with.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#22

Post by rblion »

Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

It's worth noting that science is just one side of the coin. The other side is something that every great scientist, artist, inventor, writer, and leader has explored too. Great innovations in every discipline are found where the rational and intuitive overlap.

I'm aware that there is a lot of quackery out there but there are a lot of mysteries about the nature of existence, of consciousness, of the beginning and end of the Cosmos still.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#23

Post by jerf »

Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

I recently encountered this video about an interesting possible reaction that could have been done by alchemists that might explain where the idea of turning lead to gold came from (in particular, wanting gold as an end product is no surprise, but why lead specifically as the source?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzsdORUPk48 It doesn't quite use period materials, for safety and convenience reasons, but I was satisfied that the described reaction could have been done, with more effort. And it does take "lead" and turn it into something that seems awfully close to gold. If you don't have an atomic theory of matter and understand how elements work, you know, I would submit that it's not even that "magical" of a thought to think that you're so close and surely there's just one or two last tweaks you can do to get there.

It's very easy to imagine that as being part of the inner mysteries of a mystery religion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Roman_mysteries

Now turning lead into gold is pure 100% unmitigated magic, because we know a lot more stuff. But if we didn't know that stuff, it would not be an obviously magical belief.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#24

Post by vacri »

Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

> Of course, the labels were not so clear at his time.

This is understating the issue quite a bit. Don't forget that the point of science is to test things in a robust manner, which at this point in time has been done for the things you mention, but in Newton's time they hadn't been.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#25

Post by vacri »

negamax wrote: post #13

Wasn't something happening in 1999 and then in 2012? There's a Wikipedia page on failed doomsday prophesies. Check it out.

There's always something happening 'a few years from now'. The two you mentioned were bigger than the usual doomsday prophecies.

In the early 90s, hanging on the wall of my mother's shop was a map of the new coastline of the western US after California fell into the sea in 1997. As far as I'm aware, this map is not in wide use these days...

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#26

Post by nol13 »

Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

..or, I mean he was Isaac Newton, maybe he was on to something. Just sayin yo.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#27

Post by crispinb »

If knowledge is, as one common philosophical notion goes, 'true, justified belief', then Newton clearly 'knew' nothing about 2060 as he fell severely short of justification.

It's a shame we can't be equally confident about the prediction also failing the 'truth' aspect. Depending on what exactly one might mean by 'world', it's uncertain to an uncomfortable degree that our world won't end by 2060.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#28

Post by copperx »

jerf wrote: post #23
Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

I recently encountered this video about an interesting possible reaction that could have been done by alchemists that might explain where the idea of turning lead to gold came from (in particular, wanting gold as an end product is no surprise, but why lead specifically as the source?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzsdORUPk48 It doesn't quite use period materials, for safety and convenience reasons, but I was sati…

I now worry that coming up with a cure for all cancers is a magical belief.

Re: Isaac Newton's prediction that the world would not end before 2060 (2015)

#29

Post by wallace_f »

jerf wrote: post #23
Jun8 wrote: post #4

If you're interested in this topic, you should also have a look at this article ( https://www.neh.gov/humanities/2011/januaryfebruary/feature/... ) and Keynes' wonderful lecture on the topic. In fact Newton was pre-Newtonian in terms of scientific rigor. You can perhaps say similar things about most revolutionary scientists, i.e. rarely do they fully realize the y have wrought. I think Newton being the "Last Magician…

I recently encountered this video about an interesting possible reaction that could have been done by alchemists that might explain where the idea of turning lead to gold came from (in particular, wanting gold as an end product is no surprise, but why lead specifically as the source?): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mzsdORUPk48 It doesn't quite use period materials, for safety and convenience reasons, but I was sati…

>Now turning lead into gold is pure 100% unmitigated magic

Alchemy is not useful, but what you said here is not a magical belief. All elements were in fact created through the fusion of lighter elements before them through nuclear transmutation. Stellar nucleosynthesis is the natural process creating the variety of elements in the universe.

In other words, we do conceptually know how you can turn lead in to gold, and even heavier elements than gold have already been artificially created.

Wikipedia has a periodic table with the origins of each the elements.-1

1-https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stellar_nucleosynthesis#Key_...

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