“Shake the tree,” my mom advised. “You never know what will fall out.” Put another way: It never hurts to ask. I shook the tree this year and some great things came about: a new mentor, a penalty waived for a late submission, a free plate of zeppoles. — Jennifer Suzukawa-Tseng

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1600 MATERIALISM REDUCTIONISM 

But the change encompassed much more than just cosmology. Magical thinking was on the decline, mechanistic thinking was on the rise, science was becoming grounded in mathematics, and the first dedicated “scientific societies” would soon be flourishing in London and Paris. It is instructive to look at the year 1600: As it happens, the year was something of a transitional year for Shakespeare; it is the year of Hamlet, the work that marks the end of the playwright’s learning curve, and his coming of age as the leading dramatist of his day. It was also a big year (or at least, the start of a big decade) for science. In his book It Started with Copernicus, Howard Margolis lists some of the discoveries that came to light in, or close to, 1600: The distinction between electricity and magnetism; the law of free fall; the law of inertia; the idea of the Earth as a magnet; the theory of lenses; the laws of planetary motion; Galileo’s telescopic discoveries; the law of hydrostatic pressure; the law of the swing of the pendulum. That is quite a list. Revolution or not, something big does seem to have been going on.*

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