# Quote — Fritjof Capra, The Web of Life

> The realization that systems are integrated wholes that cannot be understood by analysis was even more shocking in physics than in biology. Ever since Newton, physicists had believed that all physical phenomena could be reduced to the properties of hard and solid material particles. In the 1920s, however, quantum theory forced them to accept the fact that the solid material objects of classical physics dissolve at the subatomic level into wavelike patterns of probabilities. These patterns, moreover, do not represent probabilities of things, but rather probabilities of interconnections. The subatomic particles have no meaning as isolated entities but can be understood only as interconnections, or correlations, among various processes of observation and measurement. In other words, subatomic particles are not “things” but interconnections among things, and these, in turn, are interconnections among other things, and so on. In quantum theory we never end up with any “things”; we always deal with interconnections.

- Author: [Fritjof Capra](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra.md)
- Book: [The Web of Life](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra/the-web-of-life.md)
- Page: 30
- Source: [Wikiquote](https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fritjof_Capra#The_Web_of_Life_(1996)) ([CC BY-SA 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/))
- Quote page: https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra/the-web-of-life/the-realization-that

## More from this book

> Tektology was the first attempt in the history of science to arrive at a systematic formulation of the principles of organization operating in living and nonliving systems.

p. 43 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra/the-web-of-life/tektology-was-the.md)

> The so-called free market does not provide consumers with proper information, because the social and environmental costs of production are not part of the current economic models. ...an ecological tax reform would be strictly revenue neutral, shifting the tax burden from income taxes to "eco-taxes." …the taxes would be added to existing products, forms of energy, services, and materials, so that prices would better reflect true costs.

p. 300 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra/the-web-of-life/the-so-called-free.md)

> In the Germany of the 1920s, the Weimar Republic, both orga­nismic biology and Gestalt psychology were part of a larger intellectual trend that saw itself as a protest movement against the increasing fragmentation and alienation of human nature. The entire Weimar culture was characterized by an antimechanistic outlook, a "hunger for wholeness". Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and, later on, general systems theory all grew out of this holistic zeitgeist.

p. 32 — [Quote page](https://www.leafyquotes.com/fritjof-capra/the-web-of-life/in-the-germany.md)