Giulio Pepe edited untitled.tex  over 8 years ago

Commit id: 2316914a981dfd287c761a5695c4bb016f248c4b

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%Millions of years of evolution equipped most animals with complex instruments to exchange information. While sharing news about threats is an efficient way of increasing anyone's chances of survival, for us, that has soon become the least interesting purpose of communication. Communication is the key to open the gates of our brains and everything that goes on inside.   Science is founded on writing. Progress and new discoveries are a slow and steady process which could not happen within a single lifetime. As Isaac Newton once stated in a letter to his rival Robert Hooke: \textit{"If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants"}. giants"} \cite{2}.  Those giants are not single individuals, but a collection of revisited, accumulated thoughts and ideas of many people from the past. Writing is one of the most important part of research, it is what makes you one of \textit{the giants}. Writing goes hand in hand with reading. But reading has a darker shade. Pieces of writing are potentially eternal, and if every human writes something, the amount of scripta must be immense. If everybody on Earth writes a single word in this second, the combined corpus of words would form the equivalent of about 9,000 bibles. That's the potential amount of writing the human race can produce in an instant. But we write considerably more than a single word in our lifetime, so \textit{nobody can ever read every single word ever written}. We are restrained by our own finite time boundaries and each one of us can only put a microscopic tap into the colossal source of knowledge. That is why we specialize and why it gets harder to do so with time. That is why we select books to read and summarize them. And that is why we share our knowledge.