Jump to content

Cross-disciplinary

From Wikiversity

Cross-disciplinary means a treatment of a chunk of reality using the terminology of several disciplines all devoted to the study of the same subject. As all sciences tend to offer specialized knowledge, meaning "telling you more about less and less", cross-disciplinary also means looking for a level of detail that allows for alignment of the different disciplines.

In general all studies focus on a certain level of detail, which is then further broken down into more details, the next level of scales of a map of concepts or terms. Changing scales does not change the original subject of study, the chunk of reality, except for the level of resolution. Every time research is focused on a new level of resolution, we are in fact entering a different "number system", where the terms are not numbers and they are not regular or identical either as in the world of numbers. But they behave similarly as they take you to an end where you get stuck, unless you change scale and move to the next level of details.

In the beginning the level of details of knowledge was more or less in conformity with the span of attention, the scope of short-term memory, or the focus of observation. As you move closer to your subject, more details emerge, but the details do not necessarily give you more options to act or to react. The latest level of nuclear physics has proven that we are unable to build a device to allow us to observe nuclear fusion, just as we have no instrument to look into a black hole.

A better understanding of the world makes sense if it is accompanied with ways to make the world better at the same time. The development of humankind is the story of developing technologies with improved methods and means for targeting and delivering objects into those targets at a nano and at a cosmic level. But most of us single individuals would be happier with a better delivery of thoughts and ideas at the everyday level and within the confines of a single life-span.

See cross-cultural w:Cross-cultural for comparison.

Genezistan 10:13, 21 October 2009 (UTC)