…ultimately comes the laws of nature. So that all the founding fathers of mechanistic science, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler and Newton, were either Platonists or Pythagoreans, who saw in maths a kind of higher reality, a transcendent and eternal realm…

…The assumption was that the laws of nature are eternal mathematical ideas in the mind of a mathematical god. So when Newton discovered his law of gravitation, it wasn't just a temporary hypothesis, it was an insight into the divine mind. That's why…

…universe is within the universal gravitational field. You know, every star... This is one of the most integrative views, and even Newton, you see, he said every particle of matter attracts every other particle of matter in the universe. So everything is…

…does God know what's happening? You could say it's just a miracle beyond our comprehension. Or you could say, as Sir Isaac Newton did, that there might be a medium for this. And in Newton's case, he thought that absolute space, in which everything…

…with this capacity. He also lived in the 18th century when The science was well underway. The modern science was well underway. Newton was widely celebrated and so on. But culturally, there was still a much greater mix of various ways of seeing the world.…

…field made of? Or what's an electromagnetic field made of? This would then become a difficult problem to answer because Newton, when he proposed gravity, had no idea how matter could attract other matter across empty space. Actually, he thought God…

…time, are ideas in the mind of God. In the 17th century, the founding fathers of modern science, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, all believed that science was in the business of finding out the eternal mathematical laws of nature which were ideas in…

…we're only in the 20th century and the 21st century coming to realize. In the 19th century, and certainly at the time of Newton, the universe was seen just in terms of the bare bones of matter. Gravitation was what was the obsession of all astronomers.…

…revival in the Renaissance, and this had a great impact on the founding fathers of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, and so on. They were really more Pythagoreans than Platonists, but these two ways of thinking are closely…

…phenomena, and indeed gravitational phenomena. How on earth could matter attract matter at any other part of the universe, as Newton said, with nothing in between? There was an action at a distance involving some kind of miraculous action of matter…

…of the limitations of materialism that became clear right from the outset in 17th century science, in the great synthesis of Isaac Newton, was that matter, conceived of as dead, inert and so on, had an influence at a distance, indeed an influence which…

…with Newton's law of gravitation, proportional to the product of the masses and divided by the square of the distance. So Newton said all matter is both material and delocalized in this curious and mysterious way which he couldn't explain. Newton had no…

…distance. So Newton said all matter is both material and delocalized in this curious and mysterious way which he couldn't explain. Newton had no idea how gravitation could work because he thought it inconceivable, as he put it, that brute matter could have…

…in fact, depended on the activity of God, and he thought that space was the sense organ of God, a very interesting idea. Newton was a most interesting theologian, but this side of his work is generally forgotten. However, it's a very good way of trying…

…going on everywhere because God is space, or at least the space is the sense organ of God. So anyway, that's how Newton explained gravitation. His followers forgot about God and the sense organs of God and couldn't explain it at all, but simply took…

…time, are ideas in the mind of God. In the 17th century, the founding fathers of modern science, Kepler, Galileo, Copernicus, Newton, all believed that science was in the business of finding out the eternal mathematical laws of nature, which were ideas in…

…mind of God, and that scientists could actually reveal or read the mind of God through discovering these mathematical laws. So when Newton came up with his law of gravitation, this wasn't seen as just a temporary human model. It was seen as the unveiling…

…science. Even though many modern scientists are atheists, the founding fathers of modern science were all interested in theology, Newton, Descartes, Galileo, Kepler and others. And they thought that the mind of God worked mathematically. Mathematicians love the…

…The Mind of God. I guess there's sometimes an ironic twist because, of course, the mind of God, as conceived by Newton, was an immutable, boundless, structureless sensorium. And... and the whole point of the cosmic blueprint is that there's no blueprint but…

…interpretations of the Holy Scripture, but was a direct knowledge of God's nature. They thought of God as a mathematician. So when Newton came up with the law of gravity, this became a direct insight into God's being or mind. And so in the Enlightenment,…

…spirit, and no consciousness, just made of unconscious matter, mechanical. But the founders of modern science in the 17th century, like Newton and Descartes and Robert Boyle and Kepler and Galileo were not atheists. They were Christians, but they had a very…

…prominent European philosophers who argued in favor of panpsychism or animism. One was Leibniz, who often got into disputes with Isaac Newton. Leibniz said that nature is made up of a whole series of self-organizing units, which he called monads. And each…

…the interface, its sense organ. This recalls an idea of Isaac Newton's, one of his most interesting ideas in my view. When Newton was trying to think about the nature of gravity, he couldn't work out how matter could attract other matter across empty…

…everything? Most people who believe in God, I believe in God myself, you take it for granted as a kind of divine omniscience, but Newton was one of the very few people who thought about how it might work. And he thought one way it worked was through…

…fast it was moving, and where the entire contents of the whole universe at any given time. And through this space, Newton thought that God actually directly powered gravitation itself. We now think in terms of the gravitational field after Einstein's theory…

…It's part of nature, the gravitational field. But it's not material in the sense that it's made of matter. You see, when Newton first thought of gravitational force, the question arose, well, what's it made of? How does the moon affect the tides on the…

…that in the 20th century led to Einstein's theory of the whole universe being connected through the universal gravitational field. Newton didn't know how it worked, and Einstein suggested a field. And we have now quantum matter fields, electrons and protons…

…these symmetries using the imagination of the sciences yet Blake whilst recognizing that and recognizing its brilliance, remember he always depicts Newton for that to die away, depicts Newton in a heroic form. He's celebrating it in one way but also spotting…

…sciences yet Blake whilst recognizing that and recognizing its brilliance, remember he always depicts Newton for that to die away, depicts Newton in a heroic form. He's celebrating it in one way but also spotting the potential for narrowing that can come…

…revival in the 17th century. The founding fathers of modern science in the 16th and 17th century, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, Descartes, all thought that what they were doing was discovering the eternal mathematical laws of nature, which were ideas…

…the visible kind of reality we experience through our senses is in fact pervaded by many invisible connections. In fact, Isaac Newton in the 17th century, when modern science really began through the scientific revolution of the 17th century, came up with a…

…didn't evolve. Animals and plants didn't evolve. only humans evolved, they became better through science and they thought of Isaac Newton as a kind of god of this humanistic evolutionary worldview. Then Darwin showed, and others, showed that all of biology…

…instead of the galaxies being organized primarily by gravitation, which has been the basis of cosmology since Sir Isaac Newton, Instead, the main organizing forces are these vast electric currents, which everyone agrees really exist. They're incredibly active.…