Prigogine

We used to live in a different world but, somehow, the world we lived in has changed. These changes are not historical; they are not political or economic, cultural or intellectual. These changes appear to be actual physical changes. Is this possible? Is it possible that the world, meaning the universe, has physically altered? From the second century AD forward, the discoveries of Ptolemy, Copernicus, Tyco Brahe, Kepler, and Galileo did in fact gradually alter the Ancient worldview of the universe as finite and our solar system as earth centered. These literally world-changing discoveries culminated in the invention of the telescope and, ultimately, in the defeat of the earth-centered view of our solar system and its replacement by the view that the sun is at the center. With this, the stage was ready for the emergence of a new science. This new science no longer relied on the evidence of the senses and geometry but required much a more rigorous mathematical tool, the calculus, to complement the much more accurate technological instrument of perception, the telescope. Isaac Newton’s laws of motion plus the universal law of gravitation and the calculus, developed simultaneously by Newton and the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz, created a new universe, a possibly infinite universe, with the sun at the center of our planetary system. It was a machine-like, calculable universe whose planets and stars move as the result of known external forces, without the need for the watchful eye of God. ¹