갈릴레이에서 시작되어 뉴턴에 이르러 꽃을 피우게 되는 '과학'의 특징은, '왜'에 치중하던 이전의 자연철학자들과 달리 '왜'라는 질문은 잊어버리고 '어떻게'에 집중했다는 것에 있다. '어떻게'를 위해서는 자연의 관찰과 실험에 의존했다. 특히, '어떻게'를 기술하기 위해 수학을 도구로 사용했다. 이러한 전환은 '과학'을 매우 실용적으로 만들어서, 결국 오늘 우리가 누리는 현대 문명을 낳았다.
... In old style philosophy, what counted was knowing the innermost structure of a material--brick or brass or oak. Only then could you hope to understand how it behaved. Science turned that kind of thinking around. The susceptibility of a given material to bending could be characterized by a number that described the empirical nature of that material. Why brass bent more easily than stiff oak was a problem for another day. What mattered was that an engineer or architect could select brass or wood or some other material on account of its known properties, and could reliably calculate how it would perform in one kind of construction or another. (p. 73)