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It is interesting to note that the necessity of having a global, interdependent vision of problems exists in all other human activities, beginning with science and continuing with the social, economic, geographical, political, linguistic and spiritual fields. (18:1) In ancient times the first sciences attempted to penetrate the complexity of phenomena through intuition and speculation. The theories elaborated were ingenious and sometimes inspired, but they could hardly stand up to a confrontation with empirical experiences. Modern sciences are based only on the demonstration of theories, thus invalidating those considered inconsistent with the explanation of phenomena. As only simple interactions could be verified with certainty, science developed along the lines of Galileo and Newton. It could deal with relatively simple relationships between forces and bodies and present a vision of the world and of a universe that is reduced to those simple relationships in all their essential aspects. Newtonian science considered the physical universe as a huge mechanism that obeyed the deterministic laws of motion. The complex sets of events could be understood by this science only if they were brought back to their elementary interactions. (18:2) Therefore, the world was conceived as a mechanism made of a large number of components that acted independently and uniformly. The beginning of the twentieth century saw the collapse of the mechanistic theory, even in physics (where it was born). Sets of interacting relationships now occupy the center of attention and appear to be of such a disconcerting complexity, that even within a simple physical entity like the atom; the explanatory capacity of Newtonian mechanics has been seriously questioned.
(18:3)
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