Some have taken Newton's writings about Daniel 9, DRAWN THEIR OWN CONCLUSIONS, ADDED THAT IN, and claimed Newton predicted 2015 or 2016 as the year the world would end. But they can't point to "2016" as a year he wrote in any of his writings.
I CAN point you to where he wrote "2060". At http://recyclingtheweb.blogspot.com/2007/06/isaac-newton-supuesto-apocalipsis-del.html is an actual letter he wrote in which he said the following,
"...and the days of the short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived kingdoms, the pr*d of 1260 days, if dated from the complete conquest of these three kings A.C. 800 will end A.C. 2060. It may be later, but I see no reason for its ending sooner."
"A.C." is an abbreviation for "After Christ", The English equivalent of the Latin A.D., Anno Domini, which means "The Year of our Lord". We don't use it much in our day, but it was common in his. I could not make out his handwriting where I put "pr*d".
The idea Newton promoted the year 2016 as the end would violate what he said when he said, "It may be later (than 2060), but I see no reason for its ending sooner." He specifically said it would not be sooner than 2060. The erroneous claim of a 2016 prediction probably originated as a mishearing of the 2060 date.
He cited this date more than once. Click here for another of his writings, in which he cited the year "2060". Yet another one is at http://blogs.wsj.com/numbers/isaac-newton-calculates-the-apocalypse-130/ . He wrote this date several times in several places ... letters to friends, books/journals he kept in his own library, etc. There's no shortage of examples. The three links I have provided are not the sum total of his writings to this effect ; there are more. They are just some of the examples of him saying this.
Does it matter what Newton thought? Well lots of people are using his reputation as a brilliant scientist to bring credibility to whatever date he wrote, and attribute to him a different date than he picked. Sorry, you can't do both. But also, it only really matters what date he picked if you agree with his logic, which is kind of complicated. It is probably more important to step through the logic of a date than talk about why a brilliant man picked that date.
Newton was a brilliant man who made many advances and discovered many things the world did not previously know. But he was not right about everything. One of his most famous errors was a disagreement he had with another French scientist/mathematician named Gottfried Leibnitz, in which they publically debated whether energy released by a falling object was mass*velocity (Newton's position) or mass*velocity squared (Leibnitz's position). That is, E=mv or E=mv2. A french woman named Emilie du Chatelet would later prove her country's scientist correct on this matter and thus Newton wrong. But she still loved Newton and his math theories enough to translate his Principals of Mathematics into French for her countrymen.
Newton and Leibnitz also argued over who invented calculus, though after time it became clear that calculus was a deja vu, since it would later be found that Newton invented the base concepts of calculus, which he shared in small details privately with Leibnits, but Leibnitz improved on Newton's theories and published it.
And when Einstein later wrote E=mc2, he wasn't really coming up with something new, but just defining what happened when one reached the outer boundary of what he theorized was the speed limit of the universe - that nothing could travel faster than the speed of light.
And modern scientists consider all three of these men to have been
wrong, incomplete. Modern scientists believe the more correct equation is E2=m2c4+r2c2, where r = angular momentum. E=mc2 would be a correct special case of the more general equation when angular momentum is zero. Imagine that; one of the most famous equations in our modern culture is not completely correct!That doesn't mean that there was anything really "wrong" with Newton's theory, it just wasn't complete and therefore not mathematically reliable. Newton saw that the energy released was proportional to both mass and velocity, and to that end, he was right. He simply had not done enough measurement and calculations to get the math complete. He was on the right track, he just never got all the way to the complete mathematical formula.
When the French came up with a more correct E=mv2, they got further along than Newton, but based it on falling objects with no angular momentum. At a later date, someone would add that into the equation.
Newton tended to be a bit quieter about his religious beliefs. He was afraid if he released his religious beliefs before his death he might be persecuted as a heretic. One reason was because he did not believe in the doctrine of the Trinity. He did believe in the Father and the Son, but considered G-d to be more complicated that the concept of the Trinity explained it, and he used Daniel's mention of the Ancient of Days to suggest G-d is more complicated that the Trinitarian doctrine explains. Since he was afraid being prosecuted for this belief, he avoided publishing a lot of his religious beliefs before his death.
Pioneer thinkers often propose new ideas that are incomplete, or partially incorrect. What they propose may have more truth than error, but when you are proposing a new idea that no one thought of before, or thought of in the wrong way, it is not easy to get all the angles of that new idea worked out to completion and perfection. Sometimes it takes men building on the work of those that went before to get everything right.
Shalom,
Joe
