Christopher Hitchens’ Final Interview: Hear the Newly-Released Uncut Conversation with Richard Dawkins

Nev­er was there such an exhil­a­rat­ing time and place to be inter­est­ed in athe­ism than the inter­net of ten or fif­teen years ago. “Peo­ple com­piled end­less lists of argu­ments and coun­ter­ar­gu­ments for or against athe­ism,” remem­bers blog­ger Scott Alexan­der. One athe­ist news­group “cre­at­ed a Dewey-Dec­i­mal-sys­tem-esque index of almost a thou­sand cre­ation­ist argu­ments” and “painstak­ing­ly debunked all of them.” In turn, their cre­ation­ist arch-ene­mies “went through and debunked all of their debunk­ings.” Read­ers could enjoy a host of athe­ism-themed web comics and “the now-infa­mous r/atheism sub­red­dit, which at the time was one of Reddit’s high­est-ranked, beat­ing top­ics like ‘news,’ ‘humor,’ and — some­how — ‘sex.’ At the time, this seemed per­fect­ly nor­mal.”

This was the cul­ture in which Richard Dawkins pub­lished The God Delu­sion, in 2006, and Christo­pher Hitchens pub­lished his God Is Not Great: How Reli­gion Poi­sons Every­thing in 2007. “I’m not just doing what pub­lish­ers like and com­ing up with a provoca­tive sub­ti­tle,” Alexan­der quotes Hitchens as say­ing.  “I mean to say it infects us in our most basic integri­ty. It says we can’t be moral with­out ‘Big Broth­er,’ with­out a total­i­tar­i­an per­mis­sion, means we can’t be good to one anoth­er with­out this, we must be afraid, we must also be forced to love some­one whom we fear — the essence of sado­masochism, the essence of abjec­tion, the essence of the mas­ter-slave rela­tion­ship and that knows that death is com­ing and can’t wait to bring it on.”

Dawkins and Hitchens became known as two of the “Four Horse­men of the Non-Apoc­a­lypse,” a group of pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als that also includ­ed Sam Har­ris and Daniel Den­nett. The label stuck after all of them sat down for a two-hour con­ver­sa­tion on video in the fall 2007, dur­ing which each man laid out his cri­tique of the reli­gious world­view. Four years lat­er, Dawkins and Hitchens sat down for anoth­er record­ed con­ver­sa­tion, this time one-on-one and with a much dif­fer­ent tone. Hav­ing suf­fered from can­cer for more than a year, Hitchens seemed not to be long for this world, and indeed, he would be dead in just two months. But his con­di­tion hard­ly stopped him from speak­ing with his usu­al inci­sive­ness on top­ics of great inter­est, and espe­cial­ly his and Dawkins’ shared bête noire of fun­da­men­tal­ist reli­gion.

Dawkins, a biol­o­gist, sees in the pow­er grant­ed to reli­gion a threat to hard-won sci­en­tif­ic knowl­edge about the nature of real­i­ty; Hitchens, a writer and thinker in the tra­di­tion of George Orwell, saw it as one of the many forms of total­i­tar­i­an­ism that has ever threat­ened the intel­lec­tu­al and bod­i­ly free­dom of humankind. In this, Hitchens’ final inter­view (which was print­ed in Hitchens’ Last Inter­view book and whose uncut audio record­ing came avail­able only this year), Dawkins express­es some con­cern that he’s become a “bore” with his usu­al anti-reli­gious defense of sci­ence. Non­sense, Hitchens says: an hon­est sci­en­tist risks being called a bore just as an hon­est jour­nal­ist risks being called stri­dent, but nev­er­the­less, “you’ve got to bang on.”

Relat­ed con­tent:

Does God Exist? Christo­pher Hitchens Debates Chris­t­ian Philoso­pher William Lane Craig (2009)

Is There an After­life? Christo­pher Hitchens Spec­u­lates in an Ani­mat­ed Video

Christo­pher Hitchens: No Deathbed Con­ver­sion for Me, Thanks, But it was Good of You to Ask

Mas­ter Cura­tor Paul Hold­en­gräber Inter­views Hitchens, Her­zog, Goure­vitch & Oth­er Lead­ing Thinkers

The Last Inter­view Book Series Fea­tures the Final Words of Cul­tur­al Icons: Borges to Bowie, Philip K. Dick to Fri­da Kahlo

Richard Dawkins on Why We Should Believe in Sci­ence: “It Works … Bitch­es”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Behold a Book of Color Shades Depicted with Feathers (Circa 1915)

Per­haps the 143 col­ors show­cased in The Bay­er Company’s ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry sam­ple book, Shades on Feath­ers, could be col­lect­ed in the field, but it would involve a lot of trav­el and patience, and the stalk­ing of sev­er­al endan­gered if not down­right extinct avian species.

Far eas­i­er, and much less expen­sive, for milliners, design­ers and dec­o­ra­tors to dye plain white feath­ers  exot­ic shades, fol­low­ing the instruc­tions in the sam­ple book.

Such arti­fi­cial­ly obtained rain­bows owe a lot to William Hen­ry Perkin, a teenage stu­dent of Ger­man chemist August Wil­helm von Hof­mann, who spent East­er vaca­tion of 1856 exper­i­ment­ing with ani­line, an organ­ic base his teacher had ear­li­er dis­cov­ered in coal tar.  Hop­ing to hit on a syn­thet­ic form of qui­nine, he acci­den­tal­ly hit on a solu­tion that col­ored silk a love­ly pur­ple shade — an inad­ver­tent eure­ka moment that ranks right up there with peni­cillin and the pret­zel.

A Sci­ence Muse­um Group pro­file details what hap­pened next:

Perkin named the colour mauve and the dye mau­veine. He decid­ed to try to mar­ket his dis­cov­ery instead of return­ing to col­lege.

On 26 August 1856, the Patent Office grant­ed Perkin a patent for ‘a new colour­ing mat­ter for dye­ing with a lilac or pur­ple colour stuffs of silk, cot­ton, wool, or oth­er mate­ri­als’.

Perk­in’s next step was to inter­est cloth dyers and print­ers in his dis­cov­ery. He had no expe­ri­ence of the tex­tile trade and lit­tle knowl­edge of large-scale chem­i­cal man­u­fac­ture. He cor­re­spond­ed with Robert and John Pullar in Glas­gow, who offered him sup­port. Perk­in’s luck changed towards the end of 1857 when the Empress Eugénie, wife of Napoleon III, decid­ed that mauve was the colour to wear. In Jan­u­ary 1858, Queen Vic­to­ria fol­lowed suit, wear­ing mauve to her daughter’s wed­ding.

Cue an explo­sion of dye man­u­fac­tur­ers across Great Britain and Europe, includ­ing Bay­er, pro­duc­er of the feath­er sam­ple book. The sur­vival of this arti­fact is some­what mirac­u­lous giv­en how vul­ner­a­ble antique feath­ers are to envi­ron­men­tal fac­tors, pests, and improp­er stor­age.

(The sam­ple book rec­om­mends clean­ing the feath­ers pri­or to dying in a luke­warm solu­tion of small amounts of olive oil soap and ammo­nia.)

The Sci­ence His­to­ry Insti­tute, own­er of this unusu­al object, esti­mates that the undat­ed book was pro­duced between 1913 and 1918, the year the Migra­to­ry Bird Act Treaty out­lawed the hunt­ing of birds whose feath­ers humans deemed par­tic­u­lar­ly fash­ion­able.

Peruse the Sci­ence His­to­ry Insti­tute of Philadel­phi­a’s dig­i­tized copy of the Shades on Feath­ers sam­ple book here.

via Messy Nessy

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Down­load 435 High Res­o­lu­tion Images from John J. Audubon’s The Birds of Amer­i­ca

The Bird­song Project Fea­tures 220 Musi­cians, Actors, Artists & Writ­ers Pay­ing Trib­ute to Birds: Watch Per­for­mances by Yo-Yo Ma, Elvis Costel­lo and Beck

The Bird Library: A Library Built Espe­cial­ly for Our Fine Feath­ered Friends

- Ayun Hal­l­i­day is the Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine and author, most recent­ly, of Cre­ative, Not Famous: The Small Pota­to Man­i­festo.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

Is There Life After Death?: Michio Kaku, Bill Nye, Sam Harris & More Explore One of Life’s Biggest Questions

We should prob­a­bly not look to sci­ence to have cher­ished beliefs con­firmed. As sci­en­tif­ic under­stand­ing of the world has pro­gressed over the cen­turies, it has brought on a loss of humans’ sta­tus as priv­i­leged beings at the cen­ter of the uni­verse whose task is to sub­due and con­quer nature. (The stub­born per­sis­tence of those atti­tudes among the pow­er­ful has not served the species well.) We are not spe­cial, but we are still respon­si­ble, we have learned — maybe total­ly respon­si­ble for our lives on this plan­et. The meth­ods of sci­ence do not lend them­selves to sooth­ing exis­ten­tial anx­i­ety.

But what about the most cher­ished, and like­ly ancient, of human beliefs: faith in an after­life?  Ideas of an under­world, or heav­en, or hell have ani­mat­ed human cul­ture since its ear­li­est ori­gins. There is no soci­ety in the world where we will not find some belief in an after­life exist­ing com­fort­ably along­side life’s most mun­dane events. Is it a harm­ful idea? Is there any real evi­dence to sup­port it? And which ver­sion of an after­life — if such a thing exist­ed — should we believe?

Such ques­tions stack up. Answers in forms sci­ence can rec­on­cile seem dimin­ish­ing­ly few. Nonethe­less, as we see in the Big Think video above, sci­en­tists, sci­ence com­mu­ni­ca­tors, and sci­ence enthu­si­asts are will­ing to dis­cuss the pos­si­bil­i­ty, or impos­si­bil­i­ty, of con­tin­u­ing after death. We begin with NASA astronomer Michelle Thaller, who ref­er­ences Ein­stein’s the­o­ry of the uni­verse as ful­ly com­plete, “so every point in the past and every point in the future are just as real as the point of time you feel your­self in right now.” Time spreads out in a land­scape, each moment already mapped and sur­veyed.

When a close friend died, Ein­stein wrote a let­ter to his friend’s wife explain­ing, “Your hus­band, my friend, is just over the next hill. He’s still there” — in a the­o­ret­i­cal sense. It may not have been the com­fort she was look­ing for. The hope of an after­life is that we’ll see our loved ones again, some­thing Ein­stein’s solu­tion does not allow. Sam Har­ris — who has leaned into the mys­ti­cal prac­tice of med­i­ta­tion while pulling it from its reli­gious con­text — admits that death is a “dark mys­tery.” When peo­ple die, “there’s just the sheer not know­ing what hap­pened to them. And into this void, reli­gion comes rush­ing with a very con­sol­ing sto­ry, say­ing noth­ing hap­pened them; they’re in a bet­ter place and you’re going to meet up with them after.”

The sto­ry isn’t always so con­sol­ing, depend­ing on how puni­tive the reli­gion, but it does offer an expla­na­tion and sense of cer­tain­ty in the face of “sheer not know­ing.” The human mind does not tol­er­ate uncer­tain­ty par­tic­u­lar­ly well. Death feels like the great­est unknown of all. (Har­ris’ argu­ment par­al­lels that of anthro­pol­o­gist Pas­cal Boy­er on the ori­gin of all reli­gions.) But the phe­nom­e­non of death is not unknown to us. We are sur­round­ed by it dai­ly, from the plants and ani­mals we con­sume to the pets we sad­ly let go when their lifes­pans end. Do we keep our­selves up won­der­ing what hap­pened to these beings? Maybe our spir­i­tu­al or reli­gious beliefs aren’t always about death.…

“In the Old Tes­ta­ment there isn’t real­ly any sort of view of the after­life,” says Rob Bell, a spir­i­tu­al teacher (and the only talk­ing head here not aligned with a sci­en­tif­ic insti­tu­tion or ratio­nal­ist move­ment). “This idea that the whole thing is about when you die is not real­ly the way that lots of peo­ple have thought about it.” For many reli­gious prac­ti­tion­ers, the idea of eter­nal life means “liv­ing in har­mo­ny with the divine right now.” For many, this “right now” — this very moment and each one we expe­ri­ence after it — is eter­nal. See more views of the after­life above from sci­ence edu­ca­tors like Bill Nye and sci­en­tists like Michio Kaku, who says the kind of after­lives we’ve only seen in sci­ence fic­tion — “dig­i­tal and genet­ic immor­tal­i­ty” — “are with­in reach.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Bene­dict Cum­ber­batch Reads Nick Cave’s Beau­ti­ful Let­ter About Grief

Richard Feyn­man on Reli­gion, Sci­ence, the Search for Truth & Our Will­ing­ness to Live with Doubt

Michio Kaku & Bri­an Green Explain String The­o­ry in a Nut­shell: Ele­gant Expla­na­tions of an Ele­gant The­o­ry

Philoso­pher Sam Har­ris Leads You Through a 26-Minute Guid­ed Med­i­ta­tion

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.

Sci-Fi Writer Arthur C. Clarke Predicts the Future in 1964: Artificial Intelligence, Instantaneous Global Communication, Remote Work, Singularity & More

Are you feel­ing con­fi­dent about the future? No? We under­stand. Would you like to know what it was like to feel a deep cer­tain­ty that the decades to come were going to be filled with won­der and the fan­tas­tic? Well then, gaze upon this clip from the BBC Archive YouTube chan­nel of sci-fi author Arthur C. Clarke pre­dict­ing the future in 1964.

Although we best know him for writ­ing 2001: A Space Odyssey, the 1964 tele­vi­sion view­ing pub­lic would have known him for his futur­ism and his tal­ent for calm­ly explain­ing all the great things to come. In the late 1940s, he had already pre­dict­ed telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion satel­lites. In 1962 he pub­lished his col­lect­ed essays, Pro­files of the Future, which con­tains many of the ideas in this clip.

Here he cor­rect­ly pre­dicts the ease with which we can be con­tact­ed wher­ev­er in the world we choose to, where we can con­tact our friends “any­where on earth even if we don’t know their loca­tion.” What Clarke doesn’t pre­dict here is how “loca­tion” isn’t a thing when we’re on the inter­net. He imag­ines peo­ple work­ing just as well from Tahi­ti or Bali as they do from Lon­don. Clarke sees this advance­ment as the down­fall of the mod­ern city, as we do not need to com­mute into the city to work. Now, as so many of us are doing our jobs from home post-COVID, we’ve also dis­cov­ered the dystopia in that fan­ta­sy. (It cer­tain­ly has­n’t dropped the cost of rent.)

Next, he pre­dicts advances in biotech­nol­o­gy that would allow us to, say, train mon­keys to work as ser­vants and work­ers. (Until, he jokes, they form a union and “we’d be back right where we start­ed.) Per­haps, he says, humans have stopped evolving—what comes next is arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence (although that phrase had yet to be used) and machine evo­lu­tion, where we’d be hon­ored to be the “step­ping stone” towards that des­tiny. Make of that what you will. I know you might think it would be cool to have a mon­key but­ler, but c’mon, think of the ethics, not to men­tion the cost of bananas.

Point­ing out where Clarke gets it wrong is too easy—-nobody gets it right all of the time. How­ev­er, it is fas­ci­nat­ing that some things that have nev­er come to pass—-being able to learn a lan­guage overnight, or eras­ing your memories—have man­aged to resur­face over the years as fic­tion films, like Eter­nal Sun­shine of the Spot­less Mind. His ideas of cryo­genic sus­pen­sion are sta­ples of numer­ous hard sci-fi films.

And we are still wait­ing for the “Repli­ca­tor” machine, which would make exact dupli­cates of objects (and by so doing cause a col­lapse into “glut­to­nous bar­barism” because we’d want unlim­it­ed amounts of every­thing.) Some com­menters call this a pre­cur­sor to 3‑D print­ing. I’d say oth­er­wise, but some­thing very close to it might be around the cor­ner. Who knows? Clarke him­self agrees about all this conjecture-—it’s doomed to fail.

“That is why the future is so end­less­ly fas­ci­nat­ing. Try as we can, we’ll nev­er out­guess it.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Arthur C. Clarke Read 2001: A Space Odyssey: A Vin­tage 1976 Vinyl Record­ing

Isaac Asi­mov Pre­dicts the Future on The David Let­ter­man Show (1980)

How Pre­vi­ous Decades Pre­dict­ed the Future: The 21st Cen­tu­ry as Imag­ined in the 1900s, 1950s, 1980s, and Oth­er Eras

Octavia Butler’s Four Rules for Pre­dict­ing the Future

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.

Marie Curie’s Ph.D. Thesis on Radioactivity–Which Made Her the First Woman in France to Receive a Doctoral Degree in Physics


For her ground­break­ing research on radioac­tiv­i­ty, Marie Curie won the Nobel Prize. Or rather, she won two, one for physics and anoth­er for chem­istry, mak­ing her the only Nobel Lau­re­ate in more than one sci­ence. What’s more, her first Nobel came in 1903, the very same year she com­plet­ed her PhD the­sis at the Sor­bonne. In Recherch­es sur les sub­stances radioac­tives (or Research on Radioac­tive Sub­stances), Curie “talks about the dis­cov­ery of the new ele­ments radi­um and polo­ni­um, and also describes how she gained one of the first under­stand­ings of the new phys­i­cal phe­nom­e­non of radioac­tiv­i­ty.”

So says sci­ence Youtu­ber Toby Hendy in the intro­duc­tion below to Curie’s the­sis–a the­sis that made her the first woman in France to receive a doc­tor­al degree in physics. “Fol­low­ing on from the dis­cov­ery of X‑rays by Wil­helm Roent­gen in 1895 and Hen­ri Becquerel’s dis­cov­ery that ura­ni­um salts emit­ted sim­i­lar pen­e­tra­tion prop­er­ties,” says The Doc­u­ment Cen­tre, Curie “inves­ti­gat­ed ura­ni­um rays as a start­ing point, but in the process dis­cov­ered that the air around ura­ni­um rays is made to con­duct elec­tric­i­ty.”

Her deduc­tion that “the process was caused by prop­er­ties of the atoms them­selves” — a rev­o­lu­tion­ary find­ing that over­turned pre­vi­ous­ly held notions in physics — led her even­tu­al­ly to dis­cov­er radi­um and polo­ni­um, which would get her that sec­ond Nobel in 1911.

Unlike her Nobel Prize in physics, which she shared with her hus­band Pierre and the physi­cist Hen­ri Bec­quer­el, Marie Curie won her Nobel Prize in chem­istry alone. By 1911 Pierre had been dead for half a decade, but Marie’s sci­en­tif­ic genius could­n’t be stopped from con­tin­u­ing their pio­neer­ing research as far as she could take it in her own life­time. She clear­ly knew how vast a field her work, with and with­out her hus­band, had opened up: “Our research­es upon the new radio-active bod­ies have giv­en rise to a sci­en­tif­ic move­ment,” she writes at the end of Recherch­es sur les sub­stances radioac­tives. That move­ment con­tin­ues to make dis­cov­er­ies more than a cen­tu­ry lat­er — and her orig­i­nal the­sis itself remains radioac­tive.

Relat­ed con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed Intro­duc­tion to the Life & Work of Marie Curie, the First Female Nobel Lau­re­ate

Marie Curie Became the First Woman to Win a Nobel Prize, the First Per­son to Win Twice, and the Only Per­son in His­to­ry to Win in Two Dif­fer­ent Sci­ences

Marie Curie Invent­ed Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wound­ed Sol­diers in World War I

How Amer­i­can Women “Kick­start­ed” a Cam­paign to Give Marie Curie a Gram of Radi­um, Rais­ing $120,000 in 1921

Marie Curie Attend­ed a Secret, Under­ground “Fly­ing Uni­ver­si­ty” When Women Were Banned from Pol­ish Uni­ver­si­ties

Marie Curie’s Research Papers Are Still Radioac­tive 100+ Years Lat­er

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall, on Face­book, or on Insta­gram.

Why Do Oreos Never Come Apart Evenly?: MIT Researchers Build an “Oreometer” to Find the Answer

Despite hav­ing been around for well over a cen­tu­ry, the Oreo cook­ie has man­aged to retain cer­tain mys­ter­ies. Why, for exam­ple, does it nev­er come apart even­ly? Though dif­fer­ent Oreo-eaters pre­fer dif­fer­ent meth­ods of Oreo-eat­ing, an espe­cial­ly pop­u­lar approach to the world’s most pop­u­lar cook­ie involves twist­ing it open before con­sump­tion. That action pro­duces two sep­a­rate choco­late wafers, but as even kinder­garten­ers know from long and frus­trat­ing expe­ri­ence, the crème fill­ing sticks only to one side. It seems that no man­u­al tech­nique, no mat­ter how advanced, can split the con­tents of an Oreo close to even­ly, and only recent­ly have a team of researchers at the Mass­a­chu­setts Insti­tute of Tech­nol­o­gy sought an expla­na­tion.

This endeav­or neces­si­tat­ed an inves­ti­ga­tion of the Ore­o’s rhe­ol­o­gy — the study of the flow of mat­ter, espe­cial­ly liq­uids but also “soft solids” like crème fill­ing. Like all sci­en­tif­ic research, it involved inten­sive exper­i­men­ta­tion, and even the inven­tion of a new mea­sure­ment device: in this case, a sim­ple 3D-print­able “Ore­ome­ter” (seen in ani­mat­ed action above) that uses pen­nies and rub­ber bands.

With it the researchers applied “applied vary­ing degrees of torque and angu­lar rota­tion, not­ing the val­ues that suc­cess­ful­ly twist­ed each cook­ie apart,” writes MIT News’ Jen­nifer Chu. “In all, the team went through about 20 box­es of Ore­os, includ­ing reg­u­lar, Dou­ble Stuf, and Mega Stuf lev­els of fill­ing, and reg­u­lar, dark choco­late, and ‘gold­en’ wafer fla­vors. Sur­pris­ing­ly, they found that no mat­ter the amount of cream fill­ing or fla­vor, the cream almost always sep­a­rat­ed onto one wafer.”

Crys­tal Owens, a mechan­i­cal engi­neer­ing PhD can­di­date work­ing on this project, puts this down in large part to how Ore­os are made. “Videos of the man­u­fac­tur­ing process show that they put the first wafer down, then dis­pense a ball of cream onto that wafer before putting the sec­ond wafer on top. Appar­ent­ly that lit­tle time delay may make the cream stick bet­ter to the first wafer.” But oth­er phys­i­cal fac­tors also bear on the phe­nom­e­non as well, as doc­u­ment­ed in the paper Owens and her col­lab­o­ra­tors pub­lished ear­li­er this year in the jour­nal Physics of Flu­id. “We intro­duce Ore­ol­o­gy (/ɔriːˈɒlədʒi/), from the Nabis­co Oreo for “cook­ie” and the Greek rheo logia for ‘flow study,’ as the study of the flow and frac­ture of sand­wich cook­ies,” they write in its abstract. For a sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly inclined young­ster, one could hard­ly imag­ine a more com­pelling field.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Sci­ence & Cook­ing: Harvard’s Free Course on Mak­ing Cakes, Pael­la & Oth­er Deli­cious Food

Nor­man Rockwell’s Type­writ­ten Recipe for His Favorite Oat­meal Cook­ies

Dessert Recipes of Icon­ic Thinkers: Emi­ly Dickinson’s Coconut Cake, George Orwell’s Christ­mas Pud­ding, Alice B. Tok­las’ Hashish Fudge & More

Mak­ing Choco­late the Tra­di­tion­al Way, From Bean to Bar: A Short French Film

MIT Researchers 3D Print a Bridge Imag­ined by Leonar­do da Vin­ci in 1502— and Prove That It Actu­al­ly Works

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

In 1704, Isaac Newton Predicted That the World Will End in 2060

Newton Letter

We have become quite used to pro­nounce­ments of doom, from sci­en­tists pre­dict­ing the sixth mass extinc­tion due to the mea­sur­able effects of cli­mate change, and from reli­gion­ists declar­ing the apoc­a­lypse due to a sur­feit of sin. It’s almost impos­si­ble to imag­ine these two groups of peo­ple agree­ing on any­thing oth­er than the omi­nous por­tent of their respec­tive mes­sages. But in the ear­ly days of the sci­en­tif­ic revolution—the days of Shake­speare con­tem­po­rary Fran­cis Bacon, and lat­er 17th cen­tu­ry Descartes—it was not at all unusu­al to find both kinds of rea­son­ing, or unrea­son­ing, in the same per­son, along with beliefs in mag­ic, div­ina­tion, astrol­o­gy, etc.

Yet even in this mael­strom of het­ero­dox thought and prac­tices, Sir Isaac New­ton stood out as a par­tic­u­lar­ly odd co-exis­tence of eso­teric bib­li­cal prophe­cy, occult beliefs, and a rigid, for­mal math­e­mat­ics that not only adhered to the induc­tive sci­en­tif­ic method, but also expand­ed its poten­tial by apply­ing gen­er­al axioms to spe­cif­ic cas­es.

Yet many of Newton’s gen­er­al prin­ci­ples would seem total­ly inim­i­cal to the nat­u­ral­ism of most physi­cists today. As he was for­mu­lat­ing the prin­ci­ples of grav­i­ty and three laws of motion, for exam­ple, New­ton also sought the leg­endary Philosopher’s Stone and attempt­ed to turn met­al to gold. More­over, the devout­ly reli­gious New­ton wrote the­o­log­i­cal trea­tis­es inter­pret­ing Bib­li­cal prophe­cies and pre­dict­ing the end of the world. The date he arrived at? 2060.

NewtonPapers1AP_468x603

New­ton seems, writes sci­ence blog Anoth­er Pale Blue Dot, “as con­fi­dent of his pre­dic­tions in this realm as he was in the ratio­nal world of sci­ence.” In a 1704 let­ter exhib­it­ed at Jerusalem’s Hebrew Uni­ver­si­ty, above, New­ton describes his “rec­coning”:

So then the time times & half a time are 42 months or 1260 days or three years & an half, rec­coning twelve months to a yeare & 30 days to a month as was done in the Cal­en­dar of the prim­i­tive year. And the days of short lived Beasts being put for the years of lived [sic] king­doms, the peri­od of 1260 days, if dat­ed from the com­plete con­quest of the three kings A.C. 800, will end A.C. 2060. It may end lat­er, but I see no rea­son for its end­ing soon­er.

New­ton fur­ther demon­strates his con­fi­dence in the next sen­tence, writ­ing that his intent, “though not to assert” an answer, should in any event “put a stop the rash con­jec­tures of fan­ci­full men who are fre­quent­ly pre­dict­ing the time of the end.” Indeed. So how did he arrive at this num­ber? New­ton applied a rig­or­ous method, that is to be sure.

If you have the patience for exhaus­tive descrip­tion of how he worked out his pre­dic­tion using the Book of Daniel, you may read one here by his­to­ri­an of sci­ence Stephen Sno­be­len, who also points out how wide­spread the inter­est in Newton’s odd beliefs has become, reach­ing across every con­ti­nent, though schol­ars have known about this side of the Enlight­en­ment giant for a long time.

For a sense of the exact­ing, yet com­plete­ly bizarre fla­vor of Newton’s prophet­ic cal­cu­la­tions, see anoth­er New­ton let­ter at the of the post, tran­scribed below.

Prop. 1. The 2300 prophet­ick days did not com­mence before the rise of the lit­tle horn of the He Goat.

2 Those day [sic] did not com­mence a[f]ter the destruc­tion of Jerusalem & ye Tem­ple by the Romans A.[D.] 70.

3 The time times & half a time did not com­mence before the year 800 in wch the Popes suprema­cy com­menced

4 They did not com­mence after the re[ig]ne of Gre­go­ry the 7th. 1084

5 The 1290 days did not com­mence b[e]fore the year 842.

6 They did not com­mence after the reigne of Pope Greg. 7th. 1084

7 The dif­f­ence [sic] between the 1290 & 1335 days are a parts of the sev­en weeks.

There­fore the 2300 years do not end before ye year 2132 nor after 2370.

The time times & half time do n[o]t end before 2060 nor after [2344]

The 1290 days do not begin [this should read: end] before 2090 [New­ton might mean: 2132] nor after 1374 [sic; New­ton prob­a­bly means 2374]

The edi­to­r­i­al inser­tions are Pro­fes­sor Snobelen’s, who thinks the let­ter dates “from after 1705,” and that “the shaky hand­writ­ing sug­gests a date of com­po­si­tion late in Newton’s life.” What­ev­er the exact date, we see him much less cer­tain here; New­ton push­es around some oth­er dates—2344, 2090 (or 2132), 2374. All of them seem arbi­trary, but “giv­en the nice round­ness of the num­ber,” writes Moth­er­board, “and the fact that it appears in more than one let­ter,” 2060 has become his most mem­o­rable dat­ing for the apoc­a­lypse.

It’s impor­tant to note that New­ton didn’t believe the world would “end” in the sense of cease to exist or burn up in holy flames. His end times phi­los­o­phy resem­bles that of a sur­pris­ing num­ber of cur­rent day evan­gel­i­cals: Christ would return and reign for a mil­len­ni­um, the Jew­ish dias­po­ra would return to Israel and would, he wrote, set up “a flour­ish­ing and ever­last­ing King­dom.” We hear such state­ments often from tel­e­van­ge­lists, school boards, gov­er­nors, and pres­i­den­tial can­di­dates.

As many peo­ple have argued, despite Newton’s con­cep­tion of his sci­en­tif­ic work as a bul­wark against oth­er the­olo­gies, it ulti­mate­ly became a foun­da­tion for Deism and Nat­u­ral­ism, and has allowed sci­en­tists to make accu­rate pre­dic­tions for hun­dreds of years. 20th cen­tu­ry physics may have shown us a much more rad­i­cal­ly unsta­ble uni­verse than New­ton ever imag­ined, but his the­o­ries are, as Isaac Asi­mov would put it, “not so much wrong as incom­plete,” and still essen­tial to our under­stand­ing of cer­tain fun­da­men­tal phe­nom­e­na. But as fas­ci­nat­ing and curi­ous as Newton’s oth­er inter­ests may be, there’s no more rea­son to cred­it his prophet­ic cal­cu­la­tions than those of the Mil­lerites, Harold Camp­ing, or any oth­er apoc­a­lyp­tic dooms­day sect.

Note: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this post appeared on our site in 2015.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

M.I.T. Com­put­er Pro­gram Pre­dicts in 1973 That Civ­i­liza­tion Will End by 2040

Isaac New­ton Cre­ates a List of His 57 Sins (Cir­ca 1662)

Isaac New­ton Con­ceived of His Most Ground­break­ing Ideas Dur­ing the Great Plague of 1665

Videos Recre­ate Isaac Newton’s Neat Alche­my Exper­i­ments: Watch Sil­ver Get Turned Into Gold

The Icon­ic Design of the Dooms­day Clock Was Cre­at­ed 75 Years Ago: It Now Says We’re 100 Sec­onds to Mid­night

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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That Time When the Mediterranean Sea Dried Up & Disappeared: Animations Show How It Happened

We hear a great deal today about the poten­tial caus­es of ris­ing sea lev­els. At a cer­tain point, nat­ur­al curios­i­ty brings out the oppo­site ques­tion: what caus­es sea lev­els to fall? And for that mat­ter, can a body of water so large sim­ply van­ish entire­ly? Such a thing did hap­pen once, accord­ing to the PBS Eons video above. The sto­ry begins, from our per­spec­tive, with the dis­cov­ery about a decade ago of a giant rab­bit — or rather of the bones of a giant rab­bit, one “up to six times heav­ier than your aver­age cot­ton­tail” that “almost cer­tain­ly could­n’t hop.” This odd, long-gone spec­i­men was dubbed Nurala­gus rex: “the rab­bit king of Minor­ca,” the mod­ern-day island it ruled from about five mil­lion to three mil­lion years ago.

After liv­ing for long peri­ods of time on islands with­out nat­ur­al preda­tors, cer­tain species take on unusu­al pro­por­tions. “But how did the nor­mal-size ances­tor of Nurala­gus make it onto a Mediter­ranean island in the first place?” The answer is that Minor­ca was­n’t always an island. In fact, “mega-deposits” of salt under the floor of the Mediter­ranean sug­gest that, “at one point in his­to­ry, the Mediter­ranean Sea must have evap­o­rat­ed.” As often in our inves­ti­ga­tion of the nat­ur­al world, one strange big ques­tion leads to anoth­er even stranger and big­ger one. Geol­o­gists’ long and com­plex project of address­ing it has led them to posit a for­bid­ding-sound­ing event called the Messin­ian Salin­i­ty Cri­sis, or MSC.

MSC-explain­ing the­o­ries include a “glob­al cool­ing event” six mil­lion years ago whose cre­ation of glac­i­ers would have reduced the flow of water into the Mediter­ranean, and “tec­ton­ic events” that could have blocked off what we now know as the Strait of Gibral­tar. But the cause now best sup­port­ed by evi­dence involves a com­bi­na­tion of shifts in the Earth­’s crust and changes in its cli­mate — six­teen full cycles of them. “Dur­ing peri­ods of decreas­ing sea lev­el, the posi­tion and angle of the Earth changed with respect to the Sun, so there were peri­ods of low­er solar ener­gy, and oth­ers of high­er solar ener­gy, which increased evap­o­ra­tion rates in the Mediter­ranean. At the same time, an active­ly fold­ing and uplift­ing tec­ton­ic belt caused water input to decrease.”

The MSC seems to have last­ed for over 600,000 years. At its dri­est point, 5.6 mil­lion years ago, “exter­nal water sources were com­plete­ly cut off, and most of the water left behind in the Mediter­ranean basin was evap­o­rat­ing.” For sea crea­tures, the Mediter­ranean became unin­hab­it­able, but those that lived on dry land had a bit of a field day. These rel­a­tive­ly dry con­di­tions “allowed hip­pos, ele­phants, and oth­er megafau­na from Africa to walk and swim across the Mediter­ranean,” con­sti­tut­ing a great migra­tion that would have includ­ed the ances­tor of Nurala­gus rex. But when the sea lat­er filled back up — pos­si­bly due to a flood, as ani­mat­ed above — the rab­bit king of Minor­ca learned that, even on a geo­log­i­cal timescale, you can’t go home again.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Glob­al Warm­ing: A Free Course from UChica­go Explains Cli­mate Change

A Map Shows What Hap­pens When Our World Gets Four Degrees Warmer: The Col­orado Riv­er Dries Up, Antarc­ti­ca Urban­izes, Poly­ne­sia Van­ish­es

Why Civ­i­liza­tion Col­lapsed in 1177 BC: Watch Clas­si­cist Eric Cline’s Lec­ture That Has Already Gar­nered 5.5 Mil­lion Views

How Humans Domes­ti­cat­ed Cats (Twice)

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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