"... Science arose to prominence immediately prior to the Enlightenment—as would be expected if, indeed, science was the one indisputably new ingredient in the social and intellectual ferment that produced the Enlightenment and the s that followed. The principal Enlightenment catalyst was the publication in 1687, of Isaac Newton's Principia, which subsumed prior astronomy into a unified theory of gravitation that could be employed to predict ranging from tides to the s. This thunderclap caught the startled attention of thinkers throughout the Western world, scientific and otherwise."