Earth as Mechanical Clock

There was a second revolution, a moral one, which resulted from Galileos findings. Man was believed to have been made in God s image, was the completion and moral center of the created world. If Galileo was right, man held an insignificant position in the physical universe which did not seems fitting for the moral center 

FIGURE 3.2 Mechanical clock as metaphor for nature (The Tower Clock of the Cathedral Church of St. James, Toronto) 

Consider the attitudes towards the natural world expressed by the various engineering societies as listed in Table 2.1. Clearly, those attitudes originated in the scientific and philosophical theories of the Age of Enlightenment. Engineers should care about nature if at all only if it serves the interests of humankind. Nature has 

FIGURE 3.3 The Gaia hypothesis Earth as a living system 

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