The Clockwork Universe: Isaac Newton, the Royal Society, & the Birth of the Modern World

Edward Dolnick

feb 2011 · Harper Collins

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New York Times–bestselling Author: An “entertainingly written” account of the scientific revolution that emerged amid the horrors of seventeenth-century London (Kirkus Reviews).

In the late seventeenth century, chaos and disease reigned. Streets overflowed with filth and the murder rate was five times higher than it is today. Sickness was divine punishment, astronomy and astrology were indistinguishable, and the world’s most brilliant, ambitious, and curious scientists were tormented by contradiction. They believed in angels, devils, and alchemy, yet also believed that the universe followed precise mathematical laws that were as intricate and perfectly regulated as the mechanisms of a great clock.

The Clockwork Universe captures these thinkers as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. Award-winning writer Edward Dolnick illuminates the fascinating personalities of Newton, Leibniz, Kepler, and others, and vividly animates their momentous struggle during an era when little was known and everything was new—battles of will, faith, and intellect that would change the course of history itself.

“Dolnick’s book is lively and the characters are vivid.” —The New York Times Book Review

“A free-for-all of ideas in a character-rich, historical narrative.” —The Wall Street Journal

“Dolnick writes clearly and unpretentiously about science, and writes equally well about the tumultuous historical context for these men’s groundbreaking discoveries: the English Civil War, the Thirty Years’ War, and in 1665 and 1666 respectively, the Black Plague and the Great Fire of London. Dolnick also offers penetrating portraits of the geniuses of the day, many of them idiosyncratic in the extreme, who offer fertile ground for entertaining writing.” —Publishers Weekly

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Edward Dolnick is the author of Down the Great Unknown, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award-winning The Rescue Artist. A former chief science writer at the Boston Globe, he lives with his wife near Washington, D.C.