Cross-pollination

Thinking about how it's so easy for academics to get buried in their own subject material - like architects never leaving the lab or meeting non-architects. Architects are better than most, I think, at entertaining ideas outside their own field, but the trend in general strikes me as unnecessarily limiting.

I guess what I like best is taking ideas from one field and applying them to the next. Asking what it all means. What does it mean that photons can act as a particle or a wave? Where is the line between the metaphors we use to understand that concept and its applicability to our living, working and curious investigation of the world?

So many of the cool famous people of the past used to hang out together and bounce ideas off of each other. I want there to be collectives of academics across fields to share ideas and play out the influences of theories across fields as a way of being more human, more true to your full nature. This sort of thing has happened before like with social darwinism, philosophy of physics, agriculture as metaphor, but I feel like the scientists aren't at the table anymore once those discussions are happening.

As someone who is making the moves on science, I want to be the one having those discussions. Cross-pollination, exploring the connections between things, sussing out why things matter, and explaining back. I feel like that's my thing, my one thing if I have one.