ABSTRACT
Linear to non-linear In the 1920s, discoveries in the field of quantum mechanics demonstrated the profound interconnectivity of the universe. This revived interest in metaphysical holism among scientists and philosophers, including early ecologists and those in the organicism movement. However, by the time the dust of the Second World War had settled, these theories, with their panpsychic and idealist leanings, were lost to mainstream science, having succumbed to the purges of the logical positivists and their remnants swallowed by war. Newtonian reductionism made its forceful revival in the scientific realism that came to dominate scientific thinking of the post-war era. Yet despite its spectacular successes, reductionist science, which breaks everything down into its simpler parts, leaves a vacuum in its lop-sidedness:
How do we use the information gleaned from the parts to build up a theory of the whole? The deep difficulty here lies in the fact that the complex whole may exhibit properties that are not readily explained by understanding the parts.
