Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...handled their affairs. Affordable books made literacy a crucial skill and an unprecedented means of social advancement to those who acquired it. Established hierarchies began to crumble. Books were the world's first mass-produced items. But most important of all, printing proved to be the greatest extension of human consciousness ever created. It isn't over: the 500-year-old information revolution continues on the internet. And thanks to a German printer who wanted a more efficient way to do business, you can look that...
Newton is the man of the century for this reason: by imagining--and proving--a rational universe, he in effect redesigned the human mind. Newton gave it not only intellectual tools undreamed of before, but with them, unprecedented self-confidence and ambition. If Shakespeare incomparably enlarged humanity's conception of itself, Newton--working later, in the turmoil of the English civil war and Restoration--set in place those cooler universals that were the premise of the 18th century's Age of Reason and the dynamic of the 19th century's age of revolutions--industrial, political and social...
...sense, all the change that shaped the world until the onset of modernity had its origins in Newton's mind. For what he showed was this: the universe is knowable and governed by universal laws--therefore predictable, therefore perfectible by human reason and will. Go beyond science to politics and society: if all bodies, great and small, are subject to the same universal laws, the idea leads on to democracy (equality of all humans great and small) and the principle of universal justice. Newton's laws ousted older preferments of feudal hierarchy and magic (though Newton himself devoted frustrated years...
...live in the consequences of that immense ambition; we have seen its results, both splendid and ghastly (space exploration, Marxist utopias). If religion taught faith and the mystery of the Causeless Cause (the ultimate secret, God), Newtonism located human intelligence in a cosmos of magnificently impassive reciprocities, celestial mechanics working by God's infinitely reliable and predictable cause and effect. Perhaps Newton merely codified what we intuitively knew (equal and opposite reactions, for example). As Einstein said, "The conceptions which he used to reduce the material of experience to order seemed to flow spontaneously from experience itself, from the beautiful...
...powerful strands of the Enlightenment converged in him: a certain sky-blue clarity, an aggressive awareness of the world, a fascination with science, a mechanical vision of the universe (much thanks to Isaac Newton) and an obsession with mathematical precision. The writer Garry Wills has suggested that Jefferson believed human life could be geared to the precision and simplicity of heaven's machinery. Many of the contradictions in his character arose from the discrepancies between such intellectual machinery and the passionate, organic disorders of life...