World Knowledge Dialogue
World Knowledge Dialogue
Discussion with EO Wilson and Gerald Holton to kick off World Knowledge Dialogue at the Swiss House for Advanced Research and Education, SHARE
EO Wilson and Gerald Holton discussed the growing divide between the natural sciences and the human/social sciences and the initiatives and challenges to bridge this divide. The discussion initiated the World Knowledge Dialogue, a global initiative to overcome the gap between the sciences and the humanities.
Professor Francis Waldvogel, President Emeritus of the Swiss Federal Institutes of Technology, executive director, gave an overview of the World Knowledge Dialogue that will take place in September in Crans Montana (www.wkdialogue.org).
E.O. Wilson opened his lecture by deploring the disciplinary fragmentation that the growth of knowledge seems to produce. One of the driving forces of this fragmentation is the dynamics of academic institution: To be a successful, a scientist needs to make a specific discovery, which today is smaller in relation to the expanded total field of knowledge than in the past. He addressed himself to Waldvogel to suggest that a concentrated effort such as the WKD is indeed welcome.
Gerald Holton talked about the fact that the separation of the two cultures is a recent phenomenon, which was unknown to thinkers such as Plato, or Newton, or to natural philosophers of the mid 19th century. He maintained that this split resulted from the institutional organization of universities which provides a positive feedback mechanism to the process of disciplinary specialization. He concluded by mentioning Einstein, among others, as a Swiss researcher, who influenced by Goethe’s idea a unified knowledge, had an enormously deep understanding of how things hang together.
The question and answer section covered themes such as the establishment of an award system suggested by Wilson, which would provide incentives for trans-disciplinary research, and the need of long-term positions especially for young scientists in order to make them more independent from disciplinary evaluation systems. Waldvogel added that universities have to change their curricula around central problems rather than along disciplinary lines.
Sarah Zingg
