Matteo Cantiello edited untitled.tex  almost 9 years ago

Commit id: c154f03b35112300eaa1f4c895b36fd4018b5aeb

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\item Science and technology increasingly affect modern society.   \end{enumerate}  The first trend is easy to understand. Let's think of the cumulative knowledge of humankind as a sphere. Scientists work at the surface "\href{http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/}{pushing and try to "\href{http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/}{push  the boundary}", discovery boundary}". Discovery  increases the volume of knowledge. As the sphere's volume grows, so does its surface area; this requires an ever increasing number of researchers to tessellate the expanding cutting-edge of science. Moreover, contrary to a few hundred years ago when the sphere of knowledge was so small that a single polymath could master large chunks of it, nowadays no human can understand the details of more than a few subtopics of research. To capture the bigger picture and understand very complex research questions, collaborative efforts combining together a number of highly specific expertises are required.