Related to the theories, hypotheses and discoveries of the great 17th-century English physicist Sir Issac Newton (1642-1727). His formulation of the laws of motion and the principle of gravity sufficed as an explanation of the entire physical universe until the beginning of the 20th century and the advent of Albert Einstein. The world according to Newton came to be seen as a clockwork universe; that is, the universe worked like a clock that God had wound up and left running according to His unchanging laws. It was a rational, harmonious system created by a benevolent deity.
For all his great contributions to the understanding of the physical universe, Newton was extremly modest: "I do not know what I may appear to the world; but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me".
~Facts on File Dictionary of Cultural and Historical Allusions.
