But this did nothing to deal with the split between world of reality and world of abstraction. It was simply the next most logical step to take in the working out of the original Platonic contrivance positing separate worlds. For two thousand years scholars struggled the make Platonic dualism work only to end up with Kant telling them that when all is said and done we are unable to access any really real world at all. This is the famous end-point of the traditional metaphysics that began with the Greeks. It is with Nietzsche s Nihilism that the Modern paradigm finally, after 2,500 years of holding on, collapses in on itself.
Physics too begins to recognize the faulty ontology of Newton s extention of Platonic dualism.
The equations and theories describing the rotation of the planets, the rise of water in a tube, the trajectory of a baseball, or the strucutre of the genetic code contain aregularity and order, a clockworklike certainty, that we have come to associate with nature s laws. Scientists have long admitted, of course, that outside the laboratory our world is seldom as Euclidean as it seems in the mirror of those laws that we hold up to nature. This will become the preocupation of the 20th Century.