“The generation that grew up with Newtonian gravity found the theory entirely natural. For millennia, natural philosophers recoiled from nonlocality; in the eighteenth century, they embraced it. ...And no sooner did scholars get used to Newtonian nonlocality when along came another U-turn and a new generation went back to thinking that the world had to be—just had to be—local, thereby setting up our present predicament. ...Naturalistic explanations tend to be local. In our experience, when you want something to move... you need to go over and push on it... Thales suggested that earthquakes occur [not by the arbitrary will of gods, but] because the land is floating on a subterranean ocean... occasionally rocking back and forth. The cause is in direct contact with the effect. ...The concept of space was the atomists' [e.g., Democritus and Lucretius] creation. ...matter needs a venue to exist and move. ...If atoms were the athletes and space the playing field, locality was the rulebook. ...The atomists held that atoms interact only by direct contact.”
PO