This book takes as its starting point Pierre-Simon Laplace's much-cited dream in 1812 of 'a vast intelligence' which can 'embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom' and for which the future and the past are equally calculable. Laplace sets out THE echt-Enlightenment ideal of scientific omniscience and the classic statement of a deterministic universe. The author investigates some...