These are the nine eschatons designed by Drs. Droste and Beveridge starting in 1939, the first machines to calculate, within one standard deviation, the end date of the universe.

Rutherford’s work with radioactive decay had presented science with a new tool to both ‘carbon date’ an artifact, and gauge how much of its existence had already elapsed. Droste’s first two eschatons (fig. 2 and 3), designed to calculate the remaining time in the universe, were activated on September 4 and October 16, 1939. Both produced the same result — 1,305,360,000 — prompting a conundrum: what unit of measure was implied, and how could two tests run six weeks apart yield the same answer? This paradox became known as the Droste Effect, stating that one can either know a value or its unit of measure, but not both.

A series of eschatons followed. After the ninth and final machine was activated at 4:00pm on August 5, 1958, a doomsday prophet named Zacharias Weatherby declared that the number 1,305,360,000 had religious significance, as the product of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the two witnesses described in Revelation 11:3, the thousand years to which Satan would be bound, the beast’s ten horns and seven heads, the number of the beast himself (666), and the three-and-a-half times of tribulation (Rev. 12:14). He divined that the interval was to be measured in seconds, because in exactly 1,305,360,000 seconds, it would be midnight on December 31, 1999.

Though Weatherby’s numerological nonsense was quickly debunked — he’d prepared formulas to account for hundreds of possible test dates — his prophecy further chilled a nation still reeling from McCarthyism and a newly nuclear ussr. Science abandoned its search for the end of the universe, leaving only a series of possible dates based on scientific timescales, from the hydrogen maser oscillation period to the Rydberg constant. In all, 99 possible dates were collected, the last of which was yesterday, 2/8/2023. May our European colleagues finally close this chapter of history on August 2.

Published February 9, 2023. Copyright © 2023 Jonathan Hoefler.