I've been slowly reading Quicksilver by Neal Stephenson. It is about a thousand pages long and is the first book in Stephenson's three volume "Baroque Cycle". It is set in England and Massachussets in the late 1600s and early 1700s. After a month and a half, I'm only 300 pages in so far. and like Stephenson's earlier "Cryptonomicon", the reading is very intelligent, but weak on plot.

The main character in this starting thread works with Isaac Newton, Robert Hooke, and Gottfried Leibniz, three of the most brilliant scientists to have ever walked the earth, and a central emerging theme is the revolution of ideas that was taking place in Europe during the late 1600s and early 1700s. There is a section in the book that really struck me, and I think I'm going to quote it here. It's a bit long, but worth pushing through (much like the series itself, I hope):

"One cannot board a ship without imagining ship-wreck. Daniel envisions it as being like an opera, lasting several hours and proceeding through a series of Acts.

“Act I: The hero rises to clear skies and smooth sailing. The sun is following a smooth and well-understood celestial curve, the sea is a plane, sailors are strumming guitars and carving objects d’art from walrus tusks, et cetera, while erudite passengers take the air and muse about grand philosophical themes.

“Act II: A change in the weather is predicted based upon reading sin the captain’s barometer. Hours later it appears in the distance, a formation of clouds that is observed sketched, and analyzed. Sailors cheerfully prepare for weather.

“Act III: The storm hits. Changes are noted on the barometer, thermometer, clinometer, compass, other instruments – celestial bodes are, however, no longer visible – the sky is a boiling chaos torn unpredictably by bolts – the sea is rough, the ship heaves, the cargo remains tied safely down, but most passengers are too ill or worried to think. The sailors are working without rest – some of them sacrifice chickens in hopes of appeasing their gods. The rigging gloves with St. Elmos’s Fire – This is attributed to supernatural forces.

“Act IV: The masts snap and the rudder goes missing. There is panic. Lives are already being lost, but it is not known how many. Cannons and casks are careering randomly about, making it impossible to guess who’ll be alive and who dead ten seconds from now. The compass, barometer ,et cetera, are all destroyed and the records of their readings swept overboard – maps dissolve – sailors are helpless – those who are still alive and sentient can think of nothing to do but pray.

“Act V: The ship is no more. Survivors cling to casks and planks , fighting off the less fortunate and leaving them to drown. Everyone has reverted to a feral state of terror and misery. Huge waves shove them around without any pattern, carnivorous fish use living persons as food. There is no relief in sight, or even imaginable.

“Men of Daniel's generation were born in Act V and raised in Act IV. As students, they huddled in a small vulnerable bubble of Act III. The human race has, actually, been in Act V for most of history and has recently accomplished the miraculous feat of assembling splintered afloat on a stormy sea into a sailing ship, and then, having climbed aboard it, building instruments to measure the world, and then finding a kind of regularity in those instruments. When they were in Cambridge, Issac Newton was surrounded by a personal nimbus of Act II and was well on his way to Act I.

“But they had, perversely, been living among people who were peering into the wrong end of the telescope, or something, and who had convinced themselves that the opposite was true – that the world had once been a splendid, orderly place – that men had reasonably trouble-free move from the Garden of Eden to the Athens of Plato and Aristotle, stopping over in the Holy Land to encrypt the secrets of the Universe in the pages of the Bible, and that everything had been slowly, relentlessly falling apart ever since.”