clockwork universe Concepts

The Clockwork Universe: Saac Newto, Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern WorldI

by Edward Dolnick · 8 Feb 2011 · 439pp · 104,154 words

The Clockwork Universe Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World EDWARD DOLNICK For Lynn The universe is but a watch on a larger

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the ground as it would be for it to hover in midair. Leibniz pounced. Newton had committed heresy. Both Leibniz and Newton believed in a clockwork universe, but now Leibniz invoked the familiar image to mock his old enemy. “Sir Isaac Newton, and his followers, have also a very odd opinion concerning

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respect his triumph proved too complete. Newton would have wept with rage to know that his scientific descendants spent their lifetimes proving conclusively that the clockwork universe ran even more smoothly than he had ever believed. It ran so marvelously well, in fact, that a new consensus quickly arose—just as Newton

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, 166, 191, 192 planetary orbits and, 100–101, 147, 147, 148, 149–50, 150, 163–64, 164, 172, 275 Clarke, Samuel, 264–65, 311–12 clockwork universe, xvii, 18, 182–83, 274, 310, 311–13, 316 Coga, Arthur, 60–61 Cohen, I. Bernard, 74, 299 comets, 16–17, 40, 43, 75, 101

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, 5, 93, 96, 97, 145, 159n, 169–79, 304–5 abstraction and, 198–99, 305, 342n 198 birth, xiii, 169 character and personality, 169–70 clockwork universe and, 182–83 death, xiii, 98 experiments with falling objects, 172–79, 178, 183–86, 184, 187–89, 200 God as mathematician and, 124, 125

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, 228n Gillispie, Charles C., 94–95, 183, 297 Gingerich, Owen, 156 Glanvill, Joseph, 84, 85n, 111 God, 327n 35 chain of being and, 121–23 clockwork universe and, 182–83 cosmic harmonies and, 158n as creator/controller/designer, 37–38, 37n, 39, 41, 111, 117, 119, 121–25, 126, 127, 128, 154

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, 75 Joyce, James, 205–6 Keats, John, 95 Kepler, Johannes, xviii, 5, 41, 145–68, 304–5 birth, xiii character and personality, 146, 158–59 clockwork universe and, 182 death, xiii escape into abstractions, 134 idea about force propelling the planets and, 156 as imperial mathematician, 165 laws of, xiii, 158n, 162

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Kepler and, 155–56, 158–61 nose of, 159 uncertainty principle, 229 universe. See also planets; sun; stars anthropomorphizing of, 93 Biblical dating of, 128 clockwork universe, xvii, 18, 182–83, 274, 310, 311–13, 316 earth-centered, 91, 112, 113, 160, 176, 335n 112 eclipse prediction, 101 Einstein and shape of

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, 196, 211, 215, 219 Also by Edward Dolnick The Forger’s Spell The Rescue Artist Down the Great Unknown Madness on the Couch Copyright THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE. Copyright © 2011 by Edward Dolnick. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted

Einstein's Dice and Schrödinger's Cat: How Two Great Minds Battled Quantum Randomness to Create a Unified Theory of Physics

by Paul Halpern · 13 Apr 2015 · 282pp · 89,436 words

grapefruit, or other very handy conveniences of life. —Erwin Schrödinger, “The New Field Theory” Contents Acknowledgments ix introduction Allies and Adversaries 1 chapter one The Clockwork Universe chapter two The Crucible of Gravity 13 43 chapter three Matter Waves and Quantum Jumps chapter four The Quest for Unification 109 chapter five Spooky

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for a complete explanation of its workings, the cosmos would be patient, but two great thinkers had lost their fleeting opportunity. 12 CHAPTER ONE The Clockwork Universe These transient facts, These fugitive impressions. Must be transformed by mental acts, To permanent possessions. Then summon up your grasp of mind, Your fancy scientific

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interactions. We believe that all other forces (friction, for instance) are derived from that quartet. Each of the four operates at a different 14 The Clockwork Universe scale and possesses a different strength. Gravitation, the weakest force, draws massive bodies together over wide distances. Electromagnetism is far, far stronger and affects charged

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life, but veered toward loftier aspirations as their lives progressed. In time, each became obsessed with unraveling the mysteries of the universe, trying 16 The Clockwork Universe to discern its fundamental principles. Each was extraordinarily gifted in the insights and calculations needed for theoretical physics. Each hoped to follow in the footsteps

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them far enough, the first two lines must intersect and form a triangle. So, for instance, if one angle is 89 degrees and 18 The Clockwork Universe the other facing angle is 89 degrees, there must be a third angle (of 2 degrees) where the first two lines meet—making a very

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do just fine. The saddle shape naturally causes nearby lines to veer away from each other. As much as they would “like” to 20 The Clockwork Universe be straight, sets of parallel lines bend away from each other, making it easier for them to avoid each other. This permits an unlimited number

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then as kinetic theory), a field of physics that connects the behavior of tiny particles with large-scale thermodynamic effects such as temperature, 22 The Clockwork Universe volume, and pressure changes. To apply his techniques, he needed to assume that each gas is composed of enormous amounts of minuscule objects: atoms and

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Boltzmann would have been an extraordinary mentor. Alas, he entered university at a somber time, with a cloud hanging over the physics program. 24 The Clockwork Universe “The old Vienna institute, which had just mourned the tragic loss of Ludwig Boltzmann, . . . provided me with a direct insight into the ideas of that

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, as they didn’t seem relevant to his intellectual passions. Nonetheless, the personal connections he made would prove pivotal to his intellectual growth. 26 The Clockwork Universe Einstein’s transitions from high school to university and then from university to an academic career were much bumpier than Schrödinger’s. In 1893, Einstein

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Einstein, Schrödinger, and many other physicists of their generation. Yet at ETH, students were encouraged to stick to time-tested, practical physics. It 28 The Clockwork Universe would be a poor match for Einstein’s yearnings for innovative explanations of natural phenomena. Einstein was lucky to find a circle of friends who

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graduating. Lacking the support of any of his professors, he had nowhere to go. Only a series of miracles could rescue his career. 30 The Clockwork Universe The Road to Miracles As bells chimed for the turn of the century, the physics community was divided about the state of the profession. Older

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the higher cost of the pennies would balance their small size, allowing for a more even mix within the piggy bank. Similarly, in 32 The Clockwork Universe Planck’s model, the greater energy cost of high-frequency quanta would balance their smaller wavelengths, ensuring a more even distribution matching physical reality. Planck

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enough energy to release an electron. If light were purely a wave, theory suggested, its amount of energy would depend mainly on its 34 The Clockwork Universe brightness. Thus a bright flash of red light would necessarily convey more energy than a dim exposure to ultraviolet light. Brightness can be cranked up

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replace them with more malleable notions. If, he reasoned, moving observers saw clocks ticking slower and yardsticks shrinking in the direction of motion, 36 The Clockwork Universe light’s speed could maintain the same value. These two ideas—time dilation and length contraction—brought together Maxwell’s theory with an amended theory

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his former student took a 180-degree turn. Astonished that his “lazy dog” student had solved the long-standing puzzle of the interpretation 38 The Clockwork Universe of Maxwell’s equations, Minkowski decided to reframe the theory in a more mathematically rigorous way. By then, he had been appointed to a position

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the young Einstein well, but to advance his theory he would need to embrace non-Euclidean geometries and a fourth dimension. Einstein’s 40 The Clockwork Universe progression would in turn inspire Schrödinger, whose childhood fascination with astronomy—exemplified by the “dance of the planets” with his aunt—would deepen into an

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Life in Physics (Toronto: Thomas Allen, 2010), 67. 12. Peter Freund, A Passion for Discovery (Hackensack, NJ: World Scientific, 2007), 5–6. CHAPTER ONE: THE CLOCKWORK UNIVERSE 1. Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes, trans. and ed. Paul Arthur Schilpp (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1979), 9. 2. John Casey, The First Six Books

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator

by Keith Houston · 22 Aug 2023 · 405pp · 105,395 words

A. Bedini, “The Role of Automata in the History of Technology,” Technology and Culture 5, no. 1 (1964): 31–32. 6 Alan J. Friedman, “The Clockwork Universe,” Technology and Culture 25, no. 2 (1984): 284; Bedini, “The Role of Automata,” 32. 7 D. Masson et al., Macmillan’s Magazine, vol. 10, English

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution

by David Wootton · 7 Dec 2015 · 1,197pp · 304,245 words

was available (he was rediscovered in 1417), his concept of the machina mundi could be turned into a quite new idea, the idea of a clockwork universe. In order for this to happen, however, the text of Lucretius was not enough. What was needed was not just new machines but also a

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heavens but not terrestrial physics or biology. It was engineers such as de Caus who, by generalizing the concept of a moving mechanism, made the clockwork universe and the mechanical man possible. Geography had been remade at the beginning of the sixteenth century by mariners; the philosophy of nature was remade in

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term mechanical philosophies, but that they are very different. Of the core three arguments we have distinguished – the corpuscular philosophy, animals as automatons and the clockwork universe – they agree on the first, but each picks one and only one of the other two. Animal automata lead to atheism if humans are held

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): 169–208. ———. ‘Isaac Newton, Heretic: The Strategies of a Nicodemite’. British Journal for the History of Science 32 (1999): 381–419. ———. ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’. In The Persistence of the Sacred in Modern Thought. Ed. CL Firestone and N Jacobs. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2012: 49–184

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?’ (2006). 23. Latin text of letter to Herwart von Hohenburg quoted in Koyré, The Astronomical Revolution (1973), 378; translation from Snobelen, ‘The Myth of the Clockwork Universe’ (2012), 177 n. 24. Patrick, A Brief Account of the New Sect of Latitude-Men (1662), 25. Maffioli, Out of Galileo (1994); and Maffioli, La

What We Cannot Know: Explorations at the Edge of Knowledge

by Marcus Du Sautoy · 18 May 2016

the discovery, given that it cost him rather a lot of money. Born a hundred years after Laplace, Poincaré believed, like his compatriot, in a clockwork universe, a universe governed by mathematical laws and utterly predictable. ‘If we know exactly the laws of nature and the situation of the universe at the

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difference. According to the current model of quantum physics, it’s completely and genuinely random. It is a counterexample to Laplace’s belief in a clockwork universe. For someone on the search for certainty and knowledge the revelations of quantum physics are extremely unsettling. There is nothing I can do to know

Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World

by General Stanley McChrystal, Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell · 11 May 2015 · 409pp · 105,551 words

. Throughout the nineteenth century, phenomena that had once been written off as the work of God fell under human mastery. The vision was of a “clockwork universe” in which all laws were coherent and all causes and effects predictable. If you knew the rules and the inputs, you could foresee and sometimes

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of Taylor’s era. While we might think that our increased ability to track, measure, and communicate with people like Tarek would improve our precise “clockwork universe” management, the reality is the opposite: these changes produce a radically different climate—one of unpredictable complexity—that stymies organizations based on Taylorist efficiency. It

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not foresee a problem in entering the printout’s rounded-off numbers, assuming that the difference between .506127 and .506 would be inconsequential. In a clockwork universe it would have been inconsequential. The calculations that had successfully predicted eclipses, tides, and comets behave in straightforward ways; a small error in input data

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vastly faster and more interdependent, and thus essentially complex in entirely new ways. She lives in the wayward swirl—a totally different place from the clockwork universe. We get in trouble when we try to use tools designed for the latter to tinker with the former. SQUARE PEG, ROUND HOLE Many great

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of complexity, and science was not equipped to deal with this—indeed, science actively avoided these unpleasant truths, preferring to simplify things to fit the clockwork universe. Such efforts, Weaver maintained, are futile. You cannot force a square peg into a round hole, and you cannot force the complex to conform to

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of, 16–17, 19 China, 51, 204, 211 Clancy, Tom, 220–21 Clausewitz, Carl von, 34 climate change, 249 Cline, Preston, 113 Clinton, Hillary, 170 “clockwork universe,” 41, 54, 59, 64, 65 CNN, 85–86 Cold War, 170 Cole, USS, 133 collaboration, vii–ix, 46, 173–75, 183, 250–51 cross-functional

Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now

by Douglas Rushkoff · 21 Mar 2013 · 323pp · 95,939 words

keeping track of things numerically—as well as temporally—had become much more important. If the previous era was characterized by the calendar, this new clockwork universe would be characterized by the schedule. The bells of the monastery became the bells of the new urban society. Trade, work, meals, and the market

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machine. Over time, people conformed to ever more precisely scheduled routines. Where the priority of the calendar-driven civilization was God, the priorities of the clockwork universe would be speed and efficiency. Where calendars led people to think in terms of history, clocks led people to think in terms of productivity. Time

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suppressed.9 Now that human beings were being tuned up like machines, the needs of humans and machines became almost indistinguishable. The entirety of the clockwork universe may as well have been a machine, with new innovations emerging primarily to assist technology or the businesses on which those technologies depended. Thanks in

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and green lights was eventually applied to cars and ultimately to people navigating the crosswalks—all timed to maximize efficiency, productivity, and speed. In the clockwork universe, all human activity—from shift work to lunch breaks to TV viewing to blind dates—involved getting bodies to the right place at the right

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hearts that counted and alarms that warned us and bells that went off in our heads. Just wind me up in the morning. If the clockwork universe equated the human body with the mechanics of the clock, the digital universe now equates human consciousness with the processing of the computer. We joke

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just is. The tribal community lived in the totality of circular time; the farmers of God’s universe understood before and after; workers of the clockwork universe lived by the tick; and we creatures of the digital era must relate to the pulse. Digital time does not flow; it flicks. Like any

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unpacking one of a seemingly infinite number of its processes into our attention. Indeed, if the Axial Age was coordinated by the calendar, and the clockwork universe by the schedule, the digital era subjects us to the authority of code. Our children may have their afternoons scheduled, but we adults live in

Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters

by Brian Klaas · 23 Jan 2024 · 250pp · 96,870 words

scientists and philosophers reject the clockwork world of Laplace’s demon. It’s not that we lack understanding or the right tools to measure a clockwork universe, they argue, but rather that the mysteries of the universe are unknowable. Our lives could be different. The future will always be enigmatic, no matter

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imagine. It’s not that we don’t know. It’s that we can’t know. So, which is it? Do we live in a clockwork universe, or an uncertain one? Sixty years ago, a man named Edward Norton Lorenz brought us closer to the answer. Since his childhood, Lorenz had taken

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rounding errors, were producing major changes. That led Lorenz to a realization that cracked the foundations of how we understand the world. Even in a clockwork universe with controlled conditions, minuscule changes can make an enormous difference. Just by raising the temperature one-millionth of a degree or lowering atmospheric pressure by

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always appear uncertain, even random, to us. No matter the technological leaps we make, humans will never become Laplace’s demon. If there is a clockwork universe ticking away behind everything we see and experience, we will never fully understand it. Chaos theory meant that even those predictable billiard balls had to

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time—is deterministic. It dominated scientific thinking about change for centuries, leading to thought experiments such as Laplace’s demon, and a belief in a clockwork universe. But Newton’s laws don’t explain everything. In the last century, three major challenges to Newtonian physics have been discovered. His laws don’t

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with, 235–36, 240 role of contingency in, 167–69 “Cleopatra’s nose,” 175n climate change, 12, 122, 147 Clinton, Hillary, 116, 167, 208–9 clockwork universe, 24, 25, 26 Coase, Ronald, 200 cognitive biases, 171 coincidences, 20, 100, 137, 248 coin flips, 118–19, 143, 201, 209 Colbert, Stephen, 213 Colchester

Paradox: The Nine Greatest Enigmas in Physics

by Jim Al-Khalili · 22 Oct 2012 · 208pp · 70,860 words

which everything—all movement, all change—was predetermined. There was no free choice, no uncertainty, and no chance. This model became known as the Newtonian clockwork universe. At first glance, it is not as bleak as Einstein’s block universe, in which everything that has ever happened and will ever happen in

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the future is laid out frozen in time before us. But in fact, the clockwork universe is no different in the sense that its state at all future times is predetermined and fixed. Then this view suddenly changed. In 1886 the

Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress

by Steven Pinker · 13 Feb 2018 · 1,034pp · 241,773 words

, cosmic justice, and other guarantors of the intuition that “everything happens for a reason.” Galileo, Newton, and Laplace replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future.20 People have goals, of course, but projecting goals onto

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2010. 17. Axial Age: Goldstein 2013. 18. Explaining the Axial Age: Baumard et al. 2015. 19. From The Threepenny Opera, act II, scene 1. 20. Clockwork universe: Carroll 2016; Wootton 2015. 21. Innate illiteracy and innumeracy: Carey 2009; Wolf 2007. 22. Magical thinking, essences, word magic: Oesterdiekhoff 2015; Pinker 1997/2009, chaps