# The Turning Point: Science, Society, and the Rising Culture - Fritjof Capra Synced: [[2023_11_30]] 6:03 AM Last Highlighted: [[2023_09_13]]  ## Highlights [[2023_09_13]] (Page 67) > At the end of the nineteenth century Newtonian mechanics had lost its role as the fundamental theory of natural phenomena. Maxwell's electrodynamics and Darwin's theory of evolution involved concepts that clearly went beyond the Newtonian model and indicated that the universe was far more complex than Descartes and Newton had imagined. Nevertheless, the basic ideas underlying Newtonian physics, though insufficient to explain all natural phenomena, were still believed to be correct. The first three decades of our century changed this situation radically. Two developments in physics, culminating in relativity theory and in quantum theory, shattered all the principal concepts of the Cartesian world view and Newtonian mechanics. The nation of absolute space and time, the elementary solid particles, the fundamental material substance, the strictly causal nature of physical phenomena, and the objective description of nature none of these concepts could be extended to the new domains into which physics was now penetrating. [[2023_09_13]] (Page 72) > This shift from objects to relationships has far-reaching implications for science as a whole. Gregory Bateson even argued that relationships should be used as a basis for all definitionsr and that this should be taught to our children in elementary school. 2 Any thing, he believed, should be defined not by what it is in itself, but by its relations to other things.