Clockwork universe

It evolved during the Enlightenment in parallel with the emergence of Newton's laws governing motion and gravity.

A similar concept goes back to John of Sacrobosco's early 13th-century introduction to astronomy: On the Sphere of the World.

In this widely popular medieval text, Sacrobosco spoke of the universe as the machina mundi, the machine of the world, suggesting that the reported eclipse of the Sun at the crucifixion of Jesus was a disturbance of the order of that machine.

[1] Responding to Gottfried Leibniz,[2] a prominent supporter of the theory, in the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence, Samuel Clarke wrote: In 2009, artist Tim Wetherell created a wall piece for Questacon (The National Science and Technology centre in Canberra, Australia) representing the concept of the clockwork universe.

This steel artwork contains moving gears, a working clock, and a movie of the lunar terminator.