René Descartes passed away on this day in 1650. Celebrate his legacy with his Mechanical Philosophy (1644), which posited that the universe operated as a continuously running machine which God had set in motion.
Since he rejected Newton’s theory of gravity and idea of a vacuum in space, Descartes argued that instead the universe was composed of a ‘subtle matter’ he named ‘plenum,’ which swirled in vortices like whirlpools and actually moved the planets by contact. Here, these vortices carry the planets around the Sun.
