As the methods of science achieved greater and greater triumphs, both theoretical and practical, the old picture of how things are, the picture derived from the Bible … was replaced by a quite different one. The real world … was a world of material bodies–as vast as the sun or as small as an atom–moving ceaselessly according to unchanging and mathematically stable laws in a fixed and infinite space through time, which moved with unvarying velocity from an infinite past to an infinite future. … To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it.