A Clockwork Universe.

The "clockwork universe" theory refers to the notion that the universe behaves in a consistent and dependable pattern much like a mechanical clock, put in motion and designed by God himself.  Once "wound up" it continues ticking along without any external interference. The sun, stars, moon and planets were at this point (the 16th century) believed to revolve around the earth. Everything that was beyond the moon then was referred to as the celestial heavens- closest to God and therefore perfect and unchanging. In 1543, Copernicus put forward  a heliocentric view in which the earth moved around the sun. This was considered highly controversial and deemed blasphemous as the bible accounted an earth-centred universe. Copernicus' ground breaking discovery was supported by Galileo who used the just invented telescope to secure his own observations. He was accused of heresy in 1633 and was forced to retract his statements and beliefs (the Catholic Church had its ways-ones mainly involving torture) about the supposed existence of a heliocentric universe, which he unsurprisingly did.. It wasn't until 1992 that the church repealed the inquisition against Galileo, 350 years after his death- just a tad late. In 17th Century Northern Europe, Kepler, through pure observation put forward a modified variation of Copernicanism. He agreed that the planets moved around the sun but added that their orbital pathways were in the forms of ellipses, rather than circles. Amongst this he worked out that the square of the period of the orbit of a planet is equal to the mean distance away from the sun cubed.This was a massively important as it was a step away from simple observation and towards mathematical explanation. It was Isaac Newton who in 1666 invented calculus, or what he called "fluxons". Through it, he calculated the motion of the moon around the earth, and recognised the existing law of gravitation between two masses. Because the sun is the largest body in the solar system, it would attract the planets which would in turn rotate around it. He recorded his findings in his Principia Mathematica in 1687.