l on the table will end up. This model is extremely deterministic and rationalistic. The nineteenth century physicist regarded gas in a container as a three dimensional billiards table filled with microscopic balls banging into one another; while individual balls could not be tracked, their behavior en masse could be reliably predicted. The astronomer saw the Solar System as a vast billiards table on which the balls interacted not through direct impact but through gravitational influence.
These scientists would have understood and appreciated the rockets that lift our space probes and the trajectories which allow them to bounce, in effect, from planet to planet. They would have found incomprehensible, however, the electronic devices that control them and allow communications with them, the failure of which recently led to the loss of a Mars probe. To this day, we find the behavior of rockets and space trajectories vastly easier to explain and understand than, say, the workings of a television set.
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