This article explores the importance of a multidisciplinary approach in scientific discovery, drawing on examples from history and various fields. It argues that breakthroughs often occur when seemingly disparate ideas converge, highlighting the value of integrating humanistic knowledge with traditional scientific perspectives.
Past scientists had an intellectual background that incorporated the humanities, the social sciences, and the sciences, and their discoveries came out of that multifaceted approach.Remember the story about the elephant seen from different perspectives? Here’s a twist. A biologist with a telescope peered at the animal and said, I see a hairy grayness horizon to horizon.A climate change specialist didn’t see the elephant because he was fixated on plucking the dry grass.
Elon Musk was there, and he told them not to waste their time standing around an elephant. We need results in quantum mechanics, he explained; we need superconductivity at room temperature, we need research piped straight to technology. We need science to serve technology, which as you know improves man’s condition.The people around the elephant are scientists, but even in science, we can only see with the tools we have, and we create those tools in anticipation of what we might see. As a result, we are limited in our capacity to break out of this circle. We are primed to see or not in a certain way. However, breakouts can and do happen — often when two incommensurate ideas meet each other. Consider what happened when homo economicus or “economic man,” theory met psychology: a new field was born, behavioral psychology. Or consider the friction between gravity and God, a meeting of concepts that caused a huge shift in human society’s relationship to astronomy and divinity. Second, it’s not by chance that the examples cross the bridge between what we call humanistic knowledge and what we call science. Their conceptual distance from each other results in the possibility for innovation. The role played by metaphors in biology introduces future paths for research. Schizophrenics have a better prognosis when they are told they’re like shamans. Darwin’s nature acts, despite herself, as a causal force — like the very God that evolution puts into questio
SCIENCE HUMANITIES INTERDISCIPLINARY INNOVATION METAPHORS
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