Clockwork universe

The clockwork universe is a concept which compares the universe to a mechanical clock. It continues ticking along, as a perfect machine, with its gears governed by the laws of physics, making every aspect of the machine predictable. It evolved during the Enlightenment in parallel with the emergence of Newton's laws governing motion and gravity.

This idea was very popular among deists^[1] during the Enlightenment, when Isaac Newton derived his laws of motion, and showed that alongside the law of universal gravitation, they could predict the behaviour of both terrestrial objects and the Solar System.

A similar concept goes back to John of Sacrobosco's early 13th-century introduction to astronomy: On the Sphere of the World. In this widely popular medieval text, Sacrobosco spoke of the universe as the machina mundi, the machine of the world, suggesting that the reported eclipse of the Sun at the crucifixion of Jesus was a disturbance of the order of that machine.

Responding to Gottfried Leibniz, a prominent supporter of the theory, in the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence, Samuel Clarke wrote:

In 2009, artist Tim Wetherell created a wall piece for Questacon (The National Science and Technology centre in Canberra, Australia) representing the concept of the clockwork universe. This steel artwork contains moving gears, a working clock, and a movie of the lunar terminator.

• Mechanical philosophy
• Determinism
• Eternalism (philosophy of time)
• History of science
• Orrery
• Philosophy of space and time
• Superdeterminism

• E. J. Dijksterhuis (1961) The Mechanization of the World Picture, Oxford University Press
• Dolnick, Edward (2011) The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, and the Birth of the Modern World, HarperCollins.
• David Brewster (1850) "A Short Scheme of the True Religion", manuscript quoted in Memoirs of the Life, Writings and Discoveries of Sir Isaac Newton, cited in Dolnick, page 65.
• Anneliese Maier (1938) Die Mechanisierung des Weltbildes im 17. Jahrhundert
• Webb, R.K. ed. Knud Haakonssen (1996) "The Emergence of Rational Dissent." Enlightenment and Religion: Rational Dissent in Eighteenth-Century Britain, Cambridge University Press page 19.
• Westfall, Richard S. Science and Religion in Seventeenth-Century England. p. 201.
• Riskins, Jessica (2016) The Restless Clock: A History of the Centuries-Long Argument over What Makes Living Things Tick, University of Chicago Press.

• "The Clockwork Universe". Archived 2020-02-14 at the Wayback Machine The Physical World. Ed. John Bolton, Alan Durrant, Robert Lambourne, Joy Manners, Andrew Norton.