Alles ist Wechselwirkung. Everything is interaction. Alexander von Humboldt wrote this sentence in 1803. The researcher Tobias Kraft says of it: “Wenn es eine Humboldt-Formel gibt, dann ist es dieser Satz.” If there is a Humboldt formula, it is this sentence.
Humboldt wanted to explore the larger connections behind each single observation. The Humboldt scholar Ottmar Ette calls his science a Vernetzungswissenschaft, a science of connections.