The Clockwork Universe
Humans have always been impressed by their own creations—probably too much so. The invention of the mechanical clock was one of those inventions. It convinced us that the world had its own internal logic, and to understand it, all you had to do was understand the “clockwork” inside it. Before, we assumed everything had its own “nature”. Heavy things wanted to fall downward, that was their nature. Now they had their own internal logic—which was not like our own internal logic at all—a shocking idea!
When mining engineers discovered that a vacuum would only pull up about 33 feet of water, scientists were hard put to explain it. The traditional explanation was that nature “abhorred a vacuum”. The explanation that air itself had weight and the weight of the atmosphere was only so much, was a hard to accept, even for scientists. The atmosphere to them was an abstract idea, not something they could replicate in the laboratory. But, like many scientific ideas, they gradually got used to it, because there was no better explanation.
Much, much later the pneumatic tire was invented, one of the most important inventions in history, and now we ride around on air pressure all the time, and think nothing of it—until we get a flat tire. The ancients would have been amazed. The compressibility of air was not part of its nature, to their way of thinking. But I digress, I started to talk about clockwork.
In my youth, the wristwatch was the latest man-made miracle, and the quality was specified by the number of “jewels” it had. These were low-friction metal/crystal bearings that improved its accuracy of its escape mechanism. The young of today have no idea what I am talking about here; they have never seen one of these in action. But it gave a watch the equivalent of a heart-beat. This was carried over into computers, which have a clock to time everything that goes on in them—only in this case it is another kind of crystal that vibrates much faster: millions of times a second.
We now have a new type of distributed clockwork universe: the Internet. And just like the mechanical clocks did, it rules our lives.