clockwork universe

Cultural  

1. An image of the universe as a clock wound up by God and ticking along with its gears governed by the laws of physics. This idea was very important in the Enlightenment, when scientists realized that Newton's laws of motion, including the law of universal gravitation, could explain the behavior of the solar system.

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Example Sentences

The discovery of such patterns wear away at the traditional idea that we are a wild and crazy species besotted with free will, and thus exempt from the iron determination of the clockwork universe.

From Slate • Dec. 30, 2015

That’s a consequence of living in a clockwork universe in which every event has a determinate cause, and those causes obey eternal, knowable laws.

From Slate • Dec. 30, 2015

Whereas the clockwork universe has been invalidated by the Heisenberg uncertainty principle of quantum mechanics, quantum mechanics remains devilishly hard to interpret philosophically.

From Scientific American • May 8, 2015

The clockwork universe, then, has had a good run.

From Economist • Jan. 12, 2012

He aspired to become a colleague of the great Tycho Brahe, who for thirty-five years had devoted himself, before the invention of the telescope, to the measurement of a clockwork universe, ordered and precise.

From "Cosmos" by Carl Sagan