The modernist paradigm in science began to come apart in the 1920 s, as developments within the sciences themselves challenged the working assumptions of reductionism, atomism, and mechanism. Fundamental particles, in a very real sense, do not exist at all apart from relationships. A fundamental particle all by itself subsists in a superposition of states , its qualities of position and energy not fully determinate but represented by a wave function of probabilities. The particle only becomes determinate, it only attains definite qualities and becomes real , when it interacts with another particle or system of particles. Particles are particles only when they are in relationships.
Reality depends on relationship.
This discovery of physics in the 1920 s was in clear contradiction of the modern working assumption of atomism. It led the English physicist and mathematician James Jeans to comment that, after Einstein and Heisenberg, the universe did not resemble a great machine so much as it did a great thought . Another example of post-modern science and one less arcane and esoteric than quantum physics is the newer science of ecology. Ecology looks not just at discrete individual organisms, but examines patterns of relationships between many organisms and species within environments. Understanding the frog requires not just reducing it to its component parts, but seeing it embedded in its network of relationships.