Derideo_Te
Je Suis Charlie
- Mar 2, 2013
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In today's hyper-connected mass-culture there's tremendous downward pressure on ideas. Nothing exists in isolation. Is it more difficult than ever for new scientific ideas to survive?
Not in the least. If anything we are enjoying a scientific renaissance because of the hyperconnectivity.
There is more and more cross pollination between disciplines that are leading to some fascinating discoveries. Scientists who trained in one discipline working in another are bringing new insights and approaches.
Now is a good time to be a scientist IMO.
Sure is. One of my professors deals with quantum mechanics and started attending cosmology and astrophysics conferences once he realized that they are all tackling the same problems but from opposite ends of the size of the universe. It must have been a real game changing moment the first time some cosmologist realized that the answer to why galaxies behave in a certain way might be fund in a Feynman Diagram.
The scientists of yesteryear tended to be Renaissance men in the sense that they had a broad range of interests.
The term polymath predates renaissance man and is from the Greek polymathes. To thinking men like Plato, and then Aristotle, the idea of “having learned much,” the literal translation of the Greek word, was extremely important. Aristotle, in his diverse writings, strongly advocated that people who would choose to study rhetoric should be well versed in a variety of fields, since this gave them the opportunity to comment on a variety of situations, and develop “commonplaces
You can go all the way back to Pythagoras and his love of different maths, astronomy, natural history, philosophy, music, poetry and religion.
Collaboration is tremendously beneficial. The other side of the coin, opposite of collaboration, is groupthink. The other side of cross-pollination is eventual uniformity.
Individuation is a good word, reaching your unique potential. The space to think our own thoughts is shrinking. Pretty soon all of our brains will be linked up to the Matrix.
There are benefits to monocultures. There are benefits to quilts of diverse patches.
Yes, there is always a danger of group think but that has always been the case. The benefit of science being self correcting is that it exposes the fallacy of group think.