Renaissance minds in 21st century science

Abstract

The hypothesis-testing mode of science, which François Jacob called "day science," operates within the confines of a particular scientific field.As highly specialized experts, we confidently and safely follow the protocols of our paradigms and research programs [1,2].But there is another side of science, which Jacob called "night science": the much less structured process by which new ideas arise and questions and hypotheses are generated [3,4].While day science is compartmentalized, night science is truly interdisciplinary.You may bring an answer from your home field to another discipline, or conversely, venturing into another field may let you discover a route towards answering a research question in your main discipline.To be most creative, we may be best off cultivating interests in many areas, much like Renaissance thinkers such as Leonardo da Vinci or Galileo Galilei.But this creativity-enhancing interdisciplinarity comes at a price we may call "expert's dilemma": with your loss of status as a highly focused expert comes a loss of credibility, making it harder to get your work accepted by your peers.To resolve the dilemma, we must find our own balance between disciplinary day science expertise and interdisciplinary night science creativity.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 15 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.