Stephenson:Neal:Quicksilver:11:Hypothesis of Vortices (Neal Stephenson)

From the Quicksilver Metaweb.

Descartes and others, including (for a while) Leibniz sought to explain the orbits of planets by means of vortices in the aether. It seems nutty to us, but was preferable to them, on metaphysical grounds, to the notion of action at a distance, which is a bit troublesome even today. The comment quoted here is from Newton.