A machine is built up from distinct parts and can be reduced to those parts without losing its machine-like character. Newton gave us three laws of motion, which were intended to describe the motion of the planets. It turned out that these laws could be applied in a seemingly perfectly general way. This broader application has been the foundation of the modern scientific method and will be referred to here as the Newtonian Paradigm. In the center of this paradigm is dynamics .
Dynamics is the way the laws of motion get applied.
The local description of the motion is formulated as a differential equation called an equation of motion . Later, this was made somewhat more complicated by quantum mechanics, but the central philosophy was never changed. The paradigm has been generalized from particle motion to all systems if we recognize that quantum mechanics is part of that generalization. When we look carefully at the subject matter of physics, we see that it is the application of the Newtonian Paradigm to the universe. This application then makes the world into simple mechanisms.