With his new mathematical method, differential calculus, Newton came out with a mathematical formulation that fully completed the mechanical world view. His general laws of motion could account for the movement of objects from stones to planets. In Newton's view, God had created, in the beginning, the material particles, the forces between them, and the fundamental laws of motion. This deterministic character gave birth to a belief that if you know the state of a system, such as, time and location, in all details you could predict the future of the system with absolute certainty. The Newtonian universe produced the image of absolute space and time - both independent from each other, and indivisible units, atoms.
Absolute time flows evenly with no respect to external phenomena.
The drastic change from organism to machine in the image of nature greatly affected the way people viewed the natural world. The Holistic-Ecological Paradigm Ecological thinking is in heavy debt to the feats of modern physics. The advent of electromagnetics, Einstein's Theory of Relativity, quantum physics, and the newly born Chaos theory are major contributors of this new paradigm. The discovery of electric and magnetic phenomena by Michael Faraday and James Clerk Maxwell was the first step to undermining the mechanistic world model. Unlike Newton's interpretation of sheer interaction between two masses, this new discovery gave birth to a new concept of space, later called a field.