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

Edward Dolnick examines the scientific revolution that took shape in seventeenth-century London, a city marked by filth, disease, and violence. At the time, the murder rate was five times higher than today, and sickness was widely understood as divine punishment. Astronomy and astrology remained indistinguishable, yet the era's most brilliant scientists held contradictory beliefs—they accepted angels, devils, and alchemy while simultaneously pursuing the idea that the universe operated according to precise mathematical laws, like the mechanisms of a clock. The book follows thinkers including Newton, Leibniz, and Kepler as they grappled with fundamental questions about nature. Dolnick situates their intellectual struggles within the broader historical context of the English Civil War, the Thirty Years' War, and catastrophic events like the Black Plague and Great Fire of London in 1665 and 1666. The narrative presents these scientists as distinctive personalities whose work would ultimately reshape human understanding of the natural world.