On Sun, Jul 22, 2012 at 11:07 AM, Jed Rothwell <jedrothw...@gmail.com>wrote:
In those days the Society proceedings resembled this forum rather than a > modern journal. They were a catch-all discussion group for anything of > interest to Natural Philosophy (science). > Nice observation. I love the freewheeling character of the scientific discussions you see from those days. I think science has lost something in its present degree of technical specialization. It's easy to imagine that specialists in various subfields are too narrowly focused on what they're doing, and this can lead them to overlook things that are going on in related fields that would have a big impact if they were to follow them. The accumulated body of scientific knowledge is now obviously too large by far for any one person to become a Renaissance man (or woman) anymore. When one starts to become familiar with the language and concepts of a highly specialized subfield, it becomes clear that the dense language used in the journal articles is simply intended to effectively communicate something very specific, and there would be a diminishing return on the value of the article if you tried to dilute it for a wider audience. I think the point I'm trying to make is that it would be good for science as a whole if specialists were to also follow the summaries of developments in other fields of the kinds published in Science News, phys.org and Scientific American (editorial biases aside). Eric
