Life's Ratchet: How Molecular Machines Extract Order from Chaos Read Online Free PDF Page A

the microscopic world of the human body: As the planets go around the sun, so the blood circulates around the heart. But Harvey’s findings also received nods from more modern scientists and philosophers, especially René Descartes (1596–1650), who in The Description of the Human Body vigorously championed Harvey and argued that the body was a machine.
    Descartes’s philosophical ideas were an important step toward a mechanical view of life. Performing (sometimes gruesome) experiments on animals, he discerned that the body acted like a machine with pumps and pipes. He was one of the first natural philosophers to argue for the investigation of the body from a mechanical perspective, devoid of any mysterious forces. These ideas landed Descartes in hot water with the Catholic Church, despite his being a devout churchgoer. Descartes tried his best to reconcile what he saw in nature with Catholic theology. His solution was to divorce “mind” from the mechanical worldview he espoused. The mind or spirit was to be the realm of the soul and the divine, while the body was pure machine. The soul, which once explained everything, from the growth of plants to the human mind, had now been confined to mind alone. Everything else was matter in motion.
    The first modern atomists, after the almost complete suppression of atomism during the Middle Ages, were Isaac Beeckman (1588–1637), a Dutch philosopher and scientist, and Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655), a French Jesuit priest. Beeckman, Descartes’s teacher and friend, was considered one of most educated men of Europe at the time. Gassendi followed Beeckman in arguing for a revival of atomism and strived to make Epicurean atomism palatable for the Catholic Church. Gassendi had a different approach from that of Descartes: Whereas Descartes created dualism , the separate realms of matter and soul, Gassendi animated his atoms with the power of God, returning to an animistic view of the universe.If atoms were responsible for life, the necessary intelligence had to be built into them. And who endowed the atoms with this intelligence? God, of course.
    This idea was later adopted by the German philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716), who replaced atoms by “monads,” atomic units of thought. Later materialist philosophers, however, would discard God altogether and instead endow atoms with uncreated purpose, an idea that during the Enlightenment, the French philosopher Voltaire (1694–1778) found laughable. According to Voltaire, the idea of some kind of uncreated intelligence inherent in atoms was ridiculous. Wasn’t it simpler to just believe in God? After two thousand years of debate, it seemed that philosophers had not advanced much beyond Aristotle and Democritus.
    But this would be unfair: The mechanical worldview, the revival of atomism, and the combination of rational examination and experiment were the foundation for one of the most influential periods in the history of science, the scientific revolution, which lasted from the late sixteenth to the eighteenth century. During this period, modern science was born and natural philosophers began to distinguish science from mysticism. The towering figures of this period were Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) and Isaac Newton (1642–1726). Both Galileo and Newton were atomists and believed in using experiment and reason to find new truths about nature. Newton had a Lucretian idea of how atoms form macroscopic matter; he thought of matter as made of small, hard particles that stick together to make larger particles. This idea explained how materials can break apart, as they break “not in the midst of solid particles, but where those particles are laid together, and only touch in a few points.”
    Newton stood at the threshold between Renaissance mysticism and modern science, and much has been made of his interest in alchemy and obscure theological pursuits. Yet his alchemy led him to value experimental approaches and validated his