The appearance of the Computational Universe at a moment in human history when computers have achieved unparalleled scope and importance is obviously not coincidental. We might draw an analogy with eighteenth-century commentators who, impressed by the reductive power of Newton’s laws of motion and the increasing sophistication of time-keeping mechanisms, proclaimed that the universe was a clockwork.
— Hayles, N. Katherine. My Mother Was a Computer: Digital Subjects and Literary Texts. Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
