As the methods of science achieved greater and greater triumphs, both theoretical and practical, the old picture of how things are, the picture derived from the Bible ... was replaced by a quite different one. The real world ... was a world of material bodies--as vast as the sun or as small as an atom--moving ceaselessly according to unchanging and mathematically stable laws in a fixed and infinite space through time, which moved with unvarying velocity from an infinite past to an infinite future. ... To have discovered the cause of something is to have explained it.