This idea was very popular among
deists during the
Enlightenment, when
Isaac Newton derived his
laws of motion, and showed that alongside the law of universal
gravitation, they could predict the behaviour of both
terrestrial objects and the
Solar System. A similar concept goes back to
Johannes de Sacrobosco's early 13th-century introduction to astronomy:
On the Sphere of the World. In this widely popular medieval text, Sacrobosco spoke of the universe as the
machina mundi, the machine of the world, suggesting that the reported eclipse of the Sun at the crucifixion of Jesus was a disturbance of the order of that machine. Responding to
Gottfried Leibniz, a prominent supporter of the theory, in the
Leibniz–Clarke correspondence,
Samuel Clarke wrote: In 2009, artist Tim Wetherell created a wall piece for
Questacon (The National Science and Technology centre in Canberra, Australia) representing the concept of the clockwork universe. This steel artwork contains moving gears, a working clock, and a movie of the
lunar terminator. ==See also==