Mechanical and Analytical Methods

For the next two centuries science strode forward in great leaps and bounds showing its understanding of nature, and its mastery over it.

Medicine, using the same mechanical and analytical methods, discovered the intricate structural and later chemical components of the body - although medical research was generally on the dead not on the living.
 
This view of our world as a machine - governed by the unchanging laws of time and space - and of matter, the basic substance built up of tiny atoms, held firm until the beginning of the twentieth century.

There had been a couple of hiccups with the discovery of electricity and magnetism, neither of which performed in strict accordance with Newtonian rules, but generally everyone was happy to feel that we knew most of what was to be known about the workings of the world.

However, the quest for knowledge, once undertaken, could not be abandoned - and so this fanatical search to find the basic building blocks of our Universe also led to the shattering discoveries of modern physics.

Discoveries and theories made over the lust eight decades now seem to endanger the whole fabric of the scientific system from which they have emerged.