The Clockwork Universe by Edward Dolnick Page A

transform the world required no tools more sophisticated than a fountain pen.
    For it was the mathematicians who invented the engine that powered the scientific revolution. Centuries later, the story would find an echo. In 1931, with great hoopla, Albert Einstein and his wife, Elsa, were toured around the observatory at California’s Mount Wilson, home to the world’s biggest telescope. Someone told Elsa that astronomers had used this magnificent telescope to determine the shape of the universe. “Well,” she said, “my husband does that on the back of an old envelope.”
    Those outsiders who did take science seriously tended to dislike what they saw. The scientists themselves viewed their work as a way of paying homage to God, but their critics were not so sure. Astronomy stirred the most fear. Who needed it, when we already know the story of the heavens and the Earth, and on the best possible authority? To probe further was to treat the Bible as just another source of information, to be tested and questioned like any other. A popular bit of seventeenth-century doggerel purportedly captured the scientists’ view: “All the books of Moses / Were nothing but supposes.”
    The devout had another objection. Science diverted its practitioners from deep questions to silly ones. “Is there anything more Absurd and Impertinent,” one minister snapped, “than to find a Man, who has so great a Concern upon his Hands as the preparing for Eternity, all busy and taken up with Quadrants , and Telescopes , Furnaces , Syphons , and Air Pumps ?”
    So science irritated those who found it pompous and ridiculous. It offended those who found it subversive. Just as important, it bewildered almost everyone.

Chapter Fifteen
A Play Without an Audience
    The new science inspired ridicule and hostility partly for the simple reason that it was new. But the resentment had a deeper source—the new thinkers proposed replacing a time-honored, understandable, commonsense picture of the world with one that contradicted the plainest facts of everyday life. What could be less disputable than that we live on a fixed and solid Earth? But here came a new theory that began by flinging the Earth out into space and sending it hurtling, undetectably, through the cosmos. If the world is careening through space like a rock shot from a catapult, why don’t we feel it? Why don’t we fall off?
    The goal of the new scientists—to find ironclad, mathematical laws that described the physical world in all its changing aspects—had not been part of the traditional scientific mission. The Greeks and their successors had confined their quest for perfect order to the heavens. On Earth, nothing so harmonious could be expected. When the Greeks looked to the sky, they saw the sun, the moon, and the planets moving imperturbably on their eternal rounds. 20 The planets traced complicated paths ( planet is Greek for “wanderer”), but they continued on their way, endlessly. On the corrupt Earth, on the other hand, all motions were short-lived. Drop a ball and it bounces, then rolls, then stops. Throw a rock and seconds later it falls to the ground. Then it sits there.
    Ordinary objects could certainly be set moving—an archer tensed his muscles, drew his bow, and shot an arrow; a horse strained against its harness and pulled a plow—but here on Earth an inanimate body on its own would not keep moving. The archer or the horse evidently imparted a force of some kind, but whatever that force was it soon dissipated, as heat dissipates from a poker pulled from a fire.
    Greek physics, then, began by dividing its subject matter into two distinct pieces. In the cosmos above, motion represents the natural state of things and goes on forever. On the Earth below, rest is natural and motion calls for an explanation. No one saw this as a problem, any more than anyone saw a problem in different nations following