Roughly 100 years ago, some scientists were stating that science had just about answered all of the important questions, and that within a decade the laws of nature would be essentially understood. The advent of new technology, however, allowed them a glimpse into aspects of reality that had not been available previously. To their chagrin, they discovered that most of the old knowledge failed to apply to this new world.
"(The) exploration of the atomic and subatomic world brought scientists in contact with a strange and unexpected reality that shattered the foundations of their world view and forced them to think in entirely new ways. Nothing like that had ever happened before in science. Revolutions like those of Copernicus and Darwin had introduced profound changes in the general conception of the universe, changes that were shocking to many people, but the new concepts themselves were not difficult to grasp. In the twentieth century, however, physicist faced, for the first time, a serious challenge to their ability to understand the universe. Every time they asked nature a question in an atomic experiment, nature answered with a paradox, and the more they tried to clarify the situation, the sharper the paradoxes became. In their struggle to grasp this new reality, scientists became painfully aware that their basic concepts, their language, and their whole way of thinking were inadequate to describe atomic phenomena."
And yet psychology (with some exceptions) has continued to rely on the old, Newtonian, version of physics as its guiding metaphor. In assumption that consciousness has no effect on behavior, in largely ignoring the effect of the observer on the phenomenon being observed, in the lineal notion of cause and effect, and in the reliance on analysis, psychology has chosen to emulate an approach to physics that was discarded as inadequate long ago.
A further elaboration upon these points will be provided in a later version of this history.