Mass, Acceleration and Force
to formulate his famous laws
of dynamics in the 18th Century. They express in concise terms the
large scale behaviour of material bodies under prescribed forces. They laws
give an excellent deterministic description of the behaviour of matter provided
its motion never approaches speeds comparable with 108
ms-1. Indeed until the discovery of "chaotic systems", the
need to distinguish "determinism" from "predictability" and the laws of quantum
physics, the whole Universe appeared like a gigantic clockwork machine of
interacting particles unwinding according to the laws of Newtonian dynamics.