TOPIC: ISSUE4 - "No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge and experience to that field of study."
WORDS: 446 TIME: 00:45:00 DATE: 2007-4-10
In the era of rapid changes in society and technology, the connection of different fields is more and more important. Knowledge and experience from other fields may always improve the development of a certain fields. And more cross-disciplines comes out today due to the interaction in different fields. So in my opinion, outsider may always bring a evolutionary to a fields with the knowledge and experience of other subjects although sometimes some flaws may be made but this situation is few.
Admittedly, some subjects are developing based on their own theories, especially the fundamental ones. Subjects such as classical physics like the law of gravity that created by Newton, and pure economics as the macro-economics that raised by Keynes are all creations with the knowledge and ideas came from their own fields. And maybe in these fields the knowledge and experience from other fields are not so important. But on the other hand these fields or subjects are always be used as tools in other fields to solve the problem which may also be an kind of interaction.
However, many other fields are not the same situation as those fields; the connections with other fields may enhance the development of them greatly. A certain field can take the achievement and ideas from other fields as reference and to improve themselves. For example, John Nash, who have put mathematics and economics together and got Noble Price may prove that cross of different fields is good to a certain fields. Besides, the situation in the realm of nature science is the same, Watson and Crick, who are both physical scientist before they met each other, develop the mode of double helix which is the exact structure of DNA. In a word, knowledge and experience from other fields may bring greatly advantages to some fields.
Furthermore, with the developing of our society, more and more cross-disciplines come out today. These disciplines combine the advantages of the two or more subjects, such as biochemistry which came from the biology and chemistry, has greatly improve the development in clinical medicine and molecular biology. These coming out of new cross-discipline can solve some problem that cannot be figured out before with the combination of different subjects.
Nevertheless, the achievement from some fields may sometimes do harm to other fields too. Just like the invention of DDT has a bad affect on the global ecological system. Even though this situation is few, we also need to treat it carefully, for the cost may be unaffordable.
In sum, although sometimes the knowledge and experience from some fields may do harm to the others, the advances are more than the disadvantages. So we should encourage the bringing of useful knowledge and experience from some fields to others in order to make both fields to develop better.