The current scientific model that dominates much of our thinking and beliefs about the nature of reality was born during the Age of Enlightenment in the 1700s.
Newton's primary metaphor was that the universe runs like a clock, and all we have to do is study the parts to know how to run it. While the scientific method is a powerful way of learning more about the observable world, it has come to dominate much of our modern world-view in the absence of other models that could compete on the same terms.
Although academic science is more free from corporate influence than industrial science, it is still limited by taboos about what topic areas are worthy of study---with a resistance to methodological or ideological innovation and a privileging of the physical sciences over the "softer" sciences. Extensive research on emotional, social, and relational intelligence and learning has yet to be embraced by an educational system mired in bureaucratic and dogmatic resistance. Despite evidence of global warming that now has broad scientific and public acceptance, corporate-funded climate research still routinely calls this data into question.
Quantum mechanics, the study of atomic and subatomic systems, has been a central force in leading the reevaluation of materialist science. Emerging in the early twentieth century, quantum mechanics discovered laws that are not consistent with those of classical Newtonian physics. One of the most controversial is one of non-locality which states that interconnected particles that are separated by a vast distance will respond identically and simultaneously when an action is performed on one of them. In a fundamentally interconnected universe, such a notion makes sense, but in a universe where matter and energy are separate, it doesn't.
We have difficulty in contemplating events of our everyday lives as quantum phenomena. Yet, the principles of quantum physics are an essential component of what is happening around us. We still tend to see our world operating within the empirical science that is based upon seventeenth century, Newtonian cause and effect, mechanical physics and the Cartesian split of mind and body.
Surveys over the last few decades consistently reveal that much of the public believes in the possibility of psychic phenomena, a belief that is driven by personal experience or stories from trusted relatives or friends who have reported such experiences. Yet, when it comes to the study of such phenomena, the academic world is virtually silent. How is it possible that so many people can be vitally interested in commonly reported, albeit mysterious, human experiences, and yet only a small number of academic scientists are actively investigating them?
Because science and human progress have become inextricably linked, the twenty-first century must find a way to bring the highest potential of both back together to get to a clearer world-view of reality. Perhaps, even an age of re-enlightenment.
Source: The 2008 SHIFT Report: Changing the Story of Our Future, The Institute of Noetic Sciences