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

Where some artists use collage to express disruption, Moumin executes formal and often symmetrical designs that denote a clockwork universe.

From Washington Post

To the human eye the Moon is a piece of a clockwork universe.

From Scientific American

Newton’s mathematical cosmos is a clockwork universe, where each cause has a unique effect and we are governed not by our choices but by the rigid laws of nature.

From Scientific American

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 Literature

Almost alone among his peers, he clung to the clockwork universe of classical physics, ticking mechanistically, each moment dictating the next.

From Scientific American