One of the successful approaches to scientific or philosophical thinking about objects in the world was the way of thinking known in scholarly circles as reductionism. This refers to a reduction. People wanted to understand water as H2Oand therefore tried to attribute the property of the elixir of life to be liquid and wet to the quality of these molecules and their structure. This approach was maintained, even if it never led to convincing success.
There is a group of physicists, often present in the media, who want to break matter down into its final components in giant accelerators, which are then called elementary particles. This type of science is reductionism in its purest form, and the approach is attracting public interest and financial support because it promises to be able to state the fundamental laws on which the world is based at its end.
In fact, the advocates involved hurry to create the impression that the entire universe can be reconstructed from the basic laws to be discovered, whereby it is specifically stated that in any case the entirety of chemistry and biology can be derived from the basic rules. Although the equations are sometimes very complicated, numerical solutions can be found with the help of computers and used to calculate what is happening.
While some stars of science were doing their political rounds and collecting money for their experiments, some of their colleagues who were less in the limelight noticed that the opposite of what high-energy physics was proclaiming was happening. The closer the elementary particle experts got to their proclaimed fundamental laws, the less relevance what they found seemed to have for both the remaining real problems of physics and the pressing issues facing society. In both of these cases, it is important to take seriously a sentence from Aristotle that every child has heard before. "The whole is more than the sum of its parts".
The liquid water is more than the sum of its molecules H2O, which, as we know, are not wet themselves. In other words: reductionism no longer works, only the opposite has not yet found sufficient popularity to be welcomed and promoted with a nod of the head. This refers to the idea of emergence. Qualities suddenly appear. They emerge when many particles act collectively. This constructive approach is now in demand.
