A scientific revolution began in the seventeenth century with Sir Isaac Newton's development of the calculus and the laws of classical mechanics. Thereafter, scientists viewed nature from a profoundly different perspective. For the first time, Newtonian physics made it possible for scientists to determine the dynamics of bodies by simple equations.
Newton's work in this area was continued in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by the French physicist Pierre-Simon Laplace. Laplace is credited with the following famous quotation which is often referred to as "Laplace's Demon."
"Laplace's Demon" concerns the idea of determinism, namely the belief that the past completely determines the future. Clearly, one can see why determinism was so attractive to scientists (and philosophers — determinism has roots that can be traced back to Socrates). Indeed, this passage had a strong influence on setting the course of science for years to come, and by the early 1800's determinism had become very firmly entrenched among many scientists. In Laplace's world everything would be predetermined — no chance, no choice, and no uncertainty.
Nature, however, is much more clever than this. Towards the end of the 1800's, mathematicians and scientists began encountering some very difficult equations to solve — some in fact were completely unsolvable. A particularly troublesome set of mathematical equations were non-linear differential equations. Much in the same vein, there existed the horribly difficult and outstanding problem of three mutually gravitationally attracted bodies — the so called "three-body problem" (or its generalization to "n-bodies").
At first, problems such as these were cast-off as special cases and largely ignored. It would turn out that these so-called "special cases" would bring the birth of a new way of thinking. When these equations were finally studied in detail a fundamental change, which would ultimately overthrow the ideas of determinism, began to occur in mathematics and science. Inklings of the science that would be come to be known as "chaos" began to appear. Niels Bohr said it best: