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.

---

Example Sentences

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

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

The success of Newtonian physics opened up the prospect for a philosophical stance that became known as the clockwork universe, or alternatively, the Newtonian world machine.

From Scientific American • May 8, 2015

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

From Economist • Jan. 12, 2012

It was engineers such as de Caus who, by generalizing the concept of a moving mechanism, made the clockwork universe and the mechanical man possible.

From "The Invention of Science" by David Wootton