issue4 我的第二篇

molly1984UID: 2123299

4."No field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge and experience to that field of study."

I personally agree with this assertion that no field of study can advance significantly unless outsiders bring their knowledge and experience to that field of study. Though upon first look it may seem a little imprudent for being so absolute, after careful consideration I found it really a statement rather difficult to rebut.

First we have to admit that since science has been developing for already hundreds of years, most of the subjects have successfully undergone the phases of recognition and description and have now entered a period in which being intensively specialized and highly acquainted are the basic requirements for scientific workers. But this, however, does not mean that outsiders are futile to a sophisticated subject—after all, we don’t need the outsiders to take over the research work and carry out independent experiments; rather, since outsiders have no set patterns of thinking which experienced experts inevitably acquire in their long periods of training and working, they can sometimes bring to specialized researchers new angles to see the problem and inspirations definitive in finding the solution.

From another perspective, as the development of modern science and technology has provided new research equipments and technologies which are universal in the scientific realm, the subjects that used to be entirely different in methodologies have now begun to learn from each other for their strong points. For example, social science like the linguistics has employed quantitative analysis, in which every factor involved is given a scalar decided by the contribution it makes to the target value. On the other hand, life sciences have turned to philosophers for opinion when deciding the future development of certain subjects such as cloning, embryo stem cell study and transgenetic technology. All these, in a sense, demonstrate the importance of outside experiences and knowledge to an advancing subject.

What’s more, the increasing number of new cross-discipline subjects in the campus or on the media nowadays clearly indicates that we have entered the era in which specific subjects are amalgamating, during which outsiders’ knowledge and experiences are naturally brought in. For applied sciences, we now have subjects like physical chemistry, biomathematics, space science (太空科学怎么译?), environmental ethnics—just to name a few. And for the essence of the sciences, physics and chemistry have fused their boundaries and together state their theories at the particle level; biology and medical science have developed, of course, into a phase that deals with the chemicals in human body; branches of linguistics and psychology realized they are actually dealing with the same thing and thus formed psycholinguistics…this list can be continued on and on till you get bored. In fact the father of quantum physics M. Planck has once said (I paraphrase): “Science by nature is a whole; it is divided into different subjects because of the limit within man’s ability to recognize the world.” Then we can not even tell the knowledge is “outside” or “inside”—we only have one term: the science.

Therefore as a conclusion, under current general trends of subject developing, it is not only benefiting for subjects to take in outsiders’ knowledge and experiences if further progresses are expected, but also inevitable.