In the past few years several books have been written claiming that the "new" physics will give us our new metaphors just as the "old" physics gave us our old metaphors. But it is quickly apparent that post-Newtonian physics fails on all counts except perhaps complexity. Modern physics is something that happens inside multi-billion-dollar colliders and is interpreted by a tiny priesthood whose language is unintelligible to the bulk of society. Far from spreading to other fields, it cannot even assert authority over that part of popular culture which lies within its natural domain--science fiction. While plots occasionally hang on some nuance of modern physics, the background universe remains solidly Newtonian. Rather than embracing the new world vision, authors have invented countless gimmicks like "subspace" or "hyperspace" to preserve simultaneity or other aspects of the Newtonian world. The only phrase of common English to come from the new physics is "quantum leap", and that is popularly used in a sense very different from the original. (Far from being a drastic realignment, a quantum leap in physics is the smallest change possible.)
By contrast ecology, the study of the interactions of large-scale biological and physical systems, fulfills all these conditions. Its subject is complex, yet it is made up of objects and concepts with which we are all familiar--competition and cooperation, mutation and extinction, growth and decay, replenishment and exhaustion. In the nearby field of economics, ecological terms are driving out mechanistic ones. Increasingly the market is portrayed as an ecology in which products find "niches", go through "generations", and have "life cycles". The expansion of economic metaphors has in turn pushed ecological notions to far distant fields. In politics and philosophy there is now a "marketplace of ideas", an abstract ecology in which theories compete, cross-fertilize, and evolve. Finally, with its focus on wholes rather than parts, ecology provides a needed correction to centuries of mechanism. With its applicability to environmental problems, ecology will play a major role in mitigating the destructive consequences of the machine age.