David Peat

From Clockwork to Chaos 117calling us toward the grave. Now time was number, and number wastime.This new sense of time, based on the mechanical clock, became thestandard against which other aspects of life could be measured. Eventstook place “as regular as clockwork.” Even human beings could beclocklike. The philosopher Immanuel Kant took his daily walk withsuch regularity that his neighbors set their clocks by him. By the startof the nineteenth century particularly accurate clocks were called“regulators,” a name that had previously been applied to certain judgesand commissions. The rule of clockwork had become a metaphor forlaw and the good order of society. Within a clockwork universe therecould be no surprises and no ambiguities, only a series of certaintiesstrung out along the line of time.This metaphor of the clock also applied to the heavens, as in thephrase “Newtonian clockwork.” Isaac Newton had demonstrated thatall motion, from the fall of an apple to the orbit of the moon aroundthe earth, could be explained on the basis of three simple laws. Withtheir aid it is possible to predict eclipses of the sun and moon for centuriesto come. Because of this regularity, the solar system was comparedto a clock, a mechanism that is stable, predictable, and understandableand which holds no irregularities or surprises.The philosopher Wilhelm Leibniz satirized Newton’s God as someonewho wound up his watch at the moment of Creation and thenallowed the universe to tick away by itself. Yet Newton’s vision wasmagnificent. By stripping away the qualities of things, their taste, feel,and color, it became possible to arrive at an essence of movement—themathematical principles of structure and transformation that underliethe material world.Just as in the previous chapter we saw how Renaissance paintersdiscovered the trick of linear perspective by which they could expressthe space and depth of the world, so too Newton produced a faithfulrepresentation of the movements of the universe in terms of number.The French mathematician Pierre Simon de Laplace claimed that if hehad stood beside God at the moment of Creation he could have usedNewton’s laws to predict the entire future of the universe.Laplace’s fantasy exposes another aspect to this metaphor of