The Clockwork Universe is the story of a band of men who lived in a
world of dirt and disease but pictured a universe that ran like a
perfect machine. A meld of history and science, this book is a group
portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled
with natures most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still
hold the key to how we understand the world.
At the end of the 17th century, an age of religious wars, plague, and
the Great Fire of London when most people saw the world as falling
apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They
declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as
intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of
Shakespeare's century, when the natural and the supernatural still
twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God,
astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled
with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new.
These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and
the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise,
mathematical laws, a contradiction that tormented them and changed the
course of history. The Clockwork Universe is the fascinating and
compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the
men who made the modern world.
