Ninety-nine “top” Harvard professors are calling for the ceation of a new coordinating committee with the power to hire 75 science faculty for research that doesn’t fit comfortably within a single established discipline, according to an article in the Boston Globe today. The committee would also have the power to allocate funding for inter-disciplinary projects.

Disciplines are ways of knowing held apart by models, methodologies and the power of incumbency. Without ’em we wouldn’t know how to know. But, we also recognize there’s something artificial about the distinctions introduced by disciplines: The chemistry and the biology of animals are united in the actuality of the animal, as are its math, astrophysics and string theory. The space between the disciplines is useful to explore not only because it is, by definition, what the disciplines ignore, but also because it reminds us that we are the ones who have brought discipline to the unitary cosmos. We don’t do so arbitrarily — astrology is not a science — but neither is there only one way that works. [Tags: harvard everything_is_miscellaneous interdisicplinary science]

Categories: Uncategorized dw