The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World

by Edward Dolnick

The first symptom could be as innocuous as a sneeze (the custom of saying “Bless you!” when someone sneezes dates from this era).

When Charles II began to go gray, and when the Sun King’s hairs began to clog the royal hairbrush, the monarchs donned wigs, and soon no gentleman in Europe would venture out in public in his own hair.)

aficionado

derision.)

hermetically

The planets trace out patterns in the sky, and those patterns would be identical whether or not humans had ever taken notice of them. Mankind’s role in the cosmic drama is that of a fly buzzing around a stately grandfather clock.

wilted

ephemeral

Having failed to find Zeno’s error, Greek mathematicians opted to do the prudent thing. They put up emergency cones and yellow police tape and made a point of staying well clear of anything that involved the analysis of moving objects.

That banishment lasted twenty centuries.

belaboring.

Galileo had found a working definition of infinity—a collection is infinitely big if part of it is the same size as the whole thing!

chasm

dalliances

highfalutin

abstruse

Fox and Hounds

blithely

balk

The founders’ point, Lincoln declared, was that equality for all was a goal that should be “constantly looked to, constantly labored for, and even though never perfectly attained, constantly approximated.”

The running total continued to grow, but it became ever clearer that the number 2 represented a kind of boundary.

For the practical-minded scientists of the seventeenth century, this meant the end of Zeno.

In the battle with infinity, they declared victory. Zeno had maintained that if it took one second to reach the middle of a room, it would take forever to cross to the other side. Not so, said the new mathematicians. It would take two seconds.

hackney

evanescent

newfangled

slapdash

argued explicitly that this gift horse should be saddled and ridden, not inspected.

What can you say about one’s new girlfriend and a new found math concept?! lol!

indignation

Children liked to play with prisms because it was pretty to see how they caught the light.

The target line—in mathematical jargon the tangent line—was the prize that all the fuss was about.

Instantaneous speed was the number that average speeds approached, as you looked at shorter and shorter time intervals.

Calculus was “the philosopher’s stone that changed everything it touched to gold,” one historian wrote, and he seemed almost resentful of the new tool’s power.

strew

heretic.

Historians who have scrutinized his private papers believe that his understanding of gravity dawned slowly, over several years, rather than in a flash of insight. He threw in the apple, some suspect, simply for color.

ablest

centaur.

Atheist, in the seventeenth century, was an all-purpose slur that embraced a range of suspicious beliefs, much as commie or pinko would in Cold War America.