Assignment: "The Special Instrument"

"As it campfires glow against the dark, every culture tells stories to itself about how the gods lit up the morning sky and set the wheel of being into motion. The great scientific culture of the West, our culture, is no exception. The calculus is the story this world told itself as it became the modern world.
"It is the calculus that for the first time allowed mathematicians access to the Book, and in Newton's hands it is the calculus that became his special instrument... and ours.
"However much Newton may have passionately pursued pure mathematics, he was not in his heart purely a mathematician; during the year of miracles, it was something else that seized his imagination, some supected barely felt connection between the mathematical garden in which he had wandered with such careless authority and the massive collocation of astronomical and terrestial facts that were his to touch and tame as well. Like Einstein, his spiritual heir and only equal, Newton viewed mathematics as an instrument. In thinking about the calculus, Newton was already thinking beyond the calculus, planets in motion and falling objects moving across the enormous corridors of his mind. Let them move and tumble, those pale planets and falling objects. Something is forming itself.
"Time and space make up the the world's great vault. It is within that vault that change occurs. The night sky is lit by moonlight, the great trees sway, birds shriek, and then the opalescent light vanishes and the sun appears. Something has changed because some things have changed. This is the familiar, the continuous world. and it is this world that Newton represented by a series of daring correlations."

-- David Berlinski from Newton's Gift and A Tour of the Calculus.

Assignment: After reading "The Special Instrument" handout, list some things that are important in your life that are continuous. What would your world be like if we could not explain these things?