Intellectual nomadism and its virtues
Scientific discovery can thrive on lack of familiarity. Often, an outsider to a field will rejuvenate it and render it fertile. 1 Cross-disciplinary research is fecund. But how to encourage it? How does one go across scientific boundaries? Where obtain the “road maps” and the guides for venturing into unknown territories?
An obvious answer is multidisciplinary teams, small enough that conversation will ensue and that a “trading zone” 2 will start to exist. One ought to encourage also (bureaucracies running science as a district administration by their very existence discourage it) a spirit of intellectual nomadism. Nomadic tribes, nomadic people, nomadic nations have enriched history. Remember some of their epics: the Jewish diaspora; the Westward move from the Gobi Desert to Central Europe and to Scandinavia of Magyars and Finns; the Turkish migration from the shores of the Pacific to present-day Turkey; the tribulations of the Mongols from Central Asia to set-up empires in India and China; the Indo-European migration into Western Europe, the Gypsies embodying its lingering trace; closer to us, in the nineteenth century, the Western expansion of the United States. Such moves of populations are emblematic of a free-roving spirit of enquiry across disciplinary boundaries. A living example is Paul C. Lauterbur, a pioneer in many areas within nuclear magnetic resonance (nmr). Two of those areas he explored and put on the map almost single-handedly are carbon-13 nmr and magnetic resonance imaging (mri). His motto, borrowed from the US military during the Vietnam War, is “search and destroy,” with the meaning of forays into unknown territory for “quick and dirty” (another American phrase) sizing-up the riches.