They could not begin to calculate the orbital paths where more than one common point is the center of mass for the system. For triple stars, other multiple star systems, and for planets orbiting these or even merely double stars, they simply threw up their hands. Wiener's extension of thermodynamics Norbert Wiener, on the grounds that all information and all structure represent forms of energy, extended the original classical concepts of the Laws of Thermodynamics to describe all forms of energy. His model, though generally accepted, was not popular because it was very pessimistic. Because all information is energy, all information tends toward its most probable distribution, that of error and meaninglessness.
All structures likewise tend to break down and become rubble.
Our history and anthropology professions and literature to this day carry remnants of this attitude, to the point of reflexively assuming previous generations even in our own society to be relatively naive and even the wise men of the past in various cultures to be relatively simple-minded. Cultural anthropology reflexively dismisses any evidence even that relatively high physical technologies may have existed in previous eras, as well as periods of world-wide commerce long before Columbus or even the Vikings. Anything is reflexively dismissed which does not support the popular notion that we here and now represent the very highest point of human advance thus far, and that the further back one goes in time the more primitive conditions necessarily become. A less emotional argument, and one of perhaps greater value, was that of biological evolution itself, from which popular forms of Darwinism emerged. This flies in the face of the universal tendency of everything to degrade toward meaninglessness.