The image of a clockwork is often used to describe determinism, as in the clockwork universe of the 18 th and 19 th centuries that led Pierre Laplace to famously declare that if a super-mind knew the ...

The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World by Edward Dolnick In Europe of the 1600s, Edward Dolnick tells us, the average life expectancy was 30.

Amid such superstition, a small band of scientists — mostly mathematicians and astronomers — set out to decode the workings of the universe.

Edward Dolnick's "The Clockwork Universe" is the story of how a small band of 17th-century scientists, mathematicians and astronomers, whose ranks included Galileo, Kepler, Descartes, Leibniz and ...

Why Time Might Not Exist For centuries, humanity relied on Newton’s clockwork universe, where time ticked predictably and universally. Then came Einstein, whose special theory of relativity ...

Because of its inherent complexity, quantum theory does not allow a picture of a clockwork universe run by simple cause and effect.