Science and sensibility

摘要

Mechanical philosophies of nature flowered in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries when Enlightenment beliefs, grounded in reason and empirical observation, came to the fore. The whole Universe, it was thought, could be explained in terms of matter undergoing motions that were governed by physical laws. Most scientists today are aware of the heritage of mechanism in Isaac Newton's theories about force and matter, motion and velocity, cause and effect.