If one had to sum up the history of scientific ideas about the universe in a single sentence, one could only say that up to the seventeenth century our vision was Aristotelian, after that Newtonian. Copernicus and Tycho, Kepler and Galileo, Gilbert and Descartes lived in the no-man’s-land between the two – on a kind of tableland between two wide plains; they remind one of stormy mountain streams, whose confluence finally gave rise to the broad, majestic river of Newtonian thought.
