Science and the Systems Paradigm

Abstract

We live in a largely artificial world, one made by man as a result of the most powerful activity man has discovered: the activity of science. The intellectual and practical adventure which began in Western Europe in the 16th and 17th Centuries with Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Newton, has made our world. Only 100 years ago there was little doubt that the application of science, leading to the creation of wealth and the elimination of much disease had shown the way to a happier future. Today, noting the manifest inability of the most scientifically advanced countries to solve the problems of the real world (as opposed to the self-defined, artificial problems of the laboratory) we wonder whether the fragmentation of science into its many separate disciplines is not a significant weakness.