The Giant Machine
As we have seen from earlier instalments, it was Galileo who opened a new vista on the universe. Galileo was the first person to combine empirical knowledge (knowledge derived from experiment and observation) with mathematics, and is thus considered to be the father of modern science. But if the dawn of empirical science was glimpsed in the person of Galileo, it was the life of Sir Isaac Newton that brought it into the full light of day.
Newton was born on Christmas day in 1642, the year that Galileo died. He was a frail, sickly child, and there were times when his parents despaired of his life. But he lived to the age of eighty-four, and became one of England’s greatest sons. At the age of 18, he was admitted to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he immediately impressed his tutors with the power of his analytical mind.
In 1663 an outbreak of the plague forced Newton to return to the isolated village of Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire, where he was born. It was during this period of enforced idleness that young Isaac invented a differential and integral form of calculus, which Einstein later called one of the greatest triumphs of the human mind. Newton’s calculus has since become the basis of modern mathematics, and the foundation of modern science.
In 1666, in the same year as the great fire that destroyed a large part of London, Newton determined his law for the composition of light, which later became the basis of the science of optics. He also presented a theory of gravitation which, for accuracy and prediction, became the standard by which all subsequent scientific theories were judged. These scientific advances were so revolutionary that Isaac Barrow resigned his chair of mathematics in favor of Newton, a mere five years after he returned to Cambridge.
The genius of Newton lay in his ability to link together different aspects of the observed world in a web of mathematical relationships. In the story by which he is commonly remembered today, he intuitively recognized that the force which caused an apple to drop from a tree and fall to the ground, was the same force that moved the planets in their journey around the sun. His law of gravitation gave the exact formula by which these forces could be calculated.
He also established three laws of motion that became the basis of an entirely new system of mechanics which were still effective in guiding American astronauts to the moon in 1969. Newton was in fact so successful in establishing mathematical relationships by which natural phenomena could be explained, that he became instrumental in developing an entirely new way of viewing the world.
As more and more of the phenomena of the natural world came to be explained by means of mathematical laws established by Newton, scientists began to doubt the need for God’s existence. As they succeeded in explaining the world in mechanical terms, they came to regard the world as a sort of giant machine that operated according to fixed laws of behavior. As the British scientist and philosopher John Sullivan explained:
“The vivid world of the medievalist, a world shot through with beauty and instinct with purpose, a world having an intimate relation to his own destiny and an intelligble reason for existing in the light of that destiny, is dismissed as an illusion. It has no objective existence. The real world, as revealed by science is a world of material particles moving in accordance with mathematical laws, through space and time.” (The Limitions of Science)
According to this scientific view of the world, the universe consisted of a collection of physical objects that moved against a backdrop of space. Space was thought to be empty, unchangeable, and always at rest. It was the physical objects that moved, and they did so according to precise mechanical laws. These movements took place according to a sequence of events called time.
Time was considered to be an integral feature of the universe, yet completely independent of space and the objects it contained. Events were believed to move smoothly in time from the past, through the present, and on into the future. Nothing that mankind might do could interrupt this steady flow. This was the classical view of science that prevailed at the end of the nineteenth century.
The hallmark of this classical view was that the world existed exactly as it appeared to our senses. Space was considered to be a vast and empty backdrop in which different objects moved. These objects were believed to consist of inert matter. They moved in space according to the laws of physics, and in accordance with the law of cause and effect. Nothing could happen in our universe without an underlying cause.
Such was the confidence placed in this classical view by the scientists of that time that the Scottish physicist and engineer William Thompson, also known as Lord Kelvin, actively discouraged students from pursuing a career in physical science. He claimed that 95% of everything that could be known had already been discovered, and all that was left to the scientists of the twentieth century was “more and more precise measurement” of laws that were already known.
Yet despite the fact the this classical view of the universe was completely demolished within the first few decades of the twentieth century, the idea of the universe as a Giant Machine remains firmly entrenched in the minds of scientific men and women to this day. As the “Father of the Atom Bomb” Robert Oppenheimer wrote in 1953:
“Despite all the richness of what men have learned about the world of nature, of matter and of space, of change and of life, we carry with us today an image of the giant machine as a sign of what the objective world is really like.” (Science and the Common Understanding)
