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发表于 2007-2-11 21:36:47
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TOPIC: ISSUE4 - "No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge and experience to that field of study."
WORDS: 420 TIME: 上午 1:35:00 DATE: 2007-2-11
Outsiders' knowledge and experience is very helpful ,yet not necessary for the prosperity of a field of study.
Of course borrowing knowledge and experience from other fields of study has indeed triggered significant breakthrough in many subjects, such as the biochemistry, molecular biology. Now days interconnected fields are experiencing mutual growth and prosperity. Without supporting advances in calculus, the field of economic would never have seen the booming growth of its last 20 years. Mathematics helped convert economics from a qualitative, speculative field to a quantitative, definitive one.
But such a phenomenon by no means indicate that all fields of study can make their frog-leaps only though sharing academic light of outsiders. In fact, there are abundant factors contributing to the advancement, such as the demand of the society, a genius's flash of wisdom.
As we all know, we are in an era of the information thanks to the Internet. And at beginning it was wholly designed to meet the need of the DoD rather than was motived by outsiders’ knowledge and experience. At the height of the Cold War the DoD wanted a command-and-control network that could survive a nuclear war. At that time, all military communications used the public telephone network, which is considered vulnerable. So the experts of computer science build a prototype called ARPA. Continually universities found its great power in sharing information, then it was the computer experts, students, rather than professionals of other fields, made a significant advancement in the computer science. They connected the networks in many universities, conquered the technical difficulties. With those computer experts' efforts, we eventually step into the information era. In this case, the significant advancement in computer science is motived by the need of DoD and developed mainly by the efforts of the computer experts.
Additionally considering some field with a long history, especially the theoretical ones, we can find some examples opposite to the issue. Take physics for example, Newton's Law of Gravitation and Einstein's Theory of Relativity are utterly genius' flash of wisdom, little of which is borrowed from other subjects.
In conclusion, reason for the significant advancement in a specific field is complex and various. It is improper to consider certain one, such as the knowledge and experience of outsiders mentioned in the issue, as the crucial and decisive element to all advancements. Different fields have different features so that we have to make specific analyses before we decide which element contributes most to the advancement. In fact even in the same field, the reason for each advancement is hardly the same ones.
[ 本帖最后由 maiqidiliwu 于 2007-2-12 01:30 编辑 ] |
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