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down, Londoners surveyed the remnants of their city. Acre after acre was unrecognizable, the houses gone and even the pattern of roads and streets obliterated. People wandered in search of their homes, John Evelyn wrote, “like men in some dismal desert.”
    One Londoner hurried to St. Paul’s Cathedral, long one of the city’s landmarks but now only rubble. “The ground was so hot as almost to scorch my shoes,” William Taswell wrote. The church walls had collapsed, and the bells and the metal areas of the roof had splashed onto the ground in molten puddles. Taswell loaded his pockets with scraps of bell metal as souvenirs.
    Taswell was not the only visitor to St. Paul’s. With their own homes destroyed, many Londoners had sought refuge in the huge, seemingly permanent cathedral. They found little but smoldering rocks. In desperate need of shelter, the refugees crawled inside the underground crypts and took their place alongside the dead.
    The city itself lay silent and devastated. “Now nettles are growing, owls are screeching, thieves and cut-throats are lurking,” one witness cried out. “And terrible hath the voice of the Lord been, which hath been crying, yea roaring in the City, by these dreadful judgments of the Plague and Fire which he hath brought upon us.”

Chapter Seven
God at His Drawing Table
    England’s trembling citizens, it would eventually become clear, had the story exactly backward. The 1660s did not mark the end of time but the beginning of the modern age. We can hardly blame them for getting it wrong—the earliest scientists looked out at a world that was filthy and chaotic, a riot of noise, confusion, and sudden, arbitrary death. The sounds that filled their ears were a mix of pigs squealing on city streets, knives shrieking against grinders’ sharpening stones, and street musicians sawing away at their fiddles. The smells were dried sweat and cattle, with a background note of sewage. Chronic pain was all but universal. Medicine was useless, or worse.
    Who could contemplate that chaos and see order?
    And yet Isaac Newton turned his attention to the heavens and described a cosmos as perfectly proportioned as a Greek temple. John Ray, the most eminent naturalist of the age, focused on the living world and saw just as harmonious a picture. Every plant and animal provided yet another example of nature’s perfect design. Gottfried Leibniz, the German philosopher destined to become Newton’s greatest rival, took the widest view of all and reported the sunniest news. Leibniz took as his province Newton’s stars and planets, Ray’s insects and animals, and everything in between. The great philosopher surveyed the universe in all its variety and found, on every scale, an intricate, perfectly engineered mechanism. God had fashioned the best of all possible worlds.
    One reason that seventeenth-century scientists had such faith was mundane. Much of the mayhem all around them went unheeded, like the noise of screeching brakes and whooping sirens on city streets today. But the crucial reasons ran deeper.
    The founding fathers of science looked more or less like us, under their wigs, but they lived in a mental world nothing like ours. The point is not that they took for granted countless features of everyday life that we find horrifying or bewildering—criminals should be tortured in the city square and their bodies cut in pieces and mounted prominently around town, as a warning to others; an excursion to Bedlam to view the lunatics made for ideal entertainment; soldiers captured in wartime might spend the rest of their lives chained to a bench and rowing a galley.
    The crucial differences lay deeper than any such roster of specifics can reveal. On even the broadest questions, our assumptions conflict with theirs. We honor Isaac Newton for his colossal contributions to science, for example, but he himself regarded science as only one of his