ABSTRACT
Although Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727) did not think of the physical world as being merely mechanical, his theory was so precise and deterministic in its apparent character that succeeding generations, particularly in France, inclined to a clockwork understanding of the universe. Twentieth-century science has radically revalued this judgment. Not only has quantum theory revealed the existence of an imprecise and probabilistic subatomic domain, but the Newtonian equations of classical physics have been discovered to possess a large measure of unpredictability as an intrinsic property of the behavior they describe. This feature arises from an exquisite sensitivity to precise circumstances, which means that, for many systems, the slightest variation produces radically different future outcomes. In a word, the Newtonian world contains many more clouds than clocks. This insight has been given the name of chaos theory.
