Thirdly, big history encourages transdisciplinarity on
an unprecedented scale.
If you study the connections between science and the humanities, you unify,
in your own mind, what C.P. Snow referred to as the 'two cultures'.
Those modes of thought that investigate natural phenomena and
those that investigate the societal and individual aspects of humanity.
Often, these two cultures are on the opposite sides of campus or
in different books on the other side of the library.
For generations now more and
more disciplinary boundaries have been drawn between different subjects and
specializations making it more and more of a daunting task
to weave them into one big picture in a unified way of viewing the world.
Both science and the humanities have something in common.
Science is in many ways historical.
Every time you look into the night sky, you are essentially looking into the past,
viewing the light of stars that shone thousands and
sometimes millions of years ago.
Scientists, of many backgrounds, search the heavens for
evidence to weave together a narrative of the expanding cosmos.
Every time you dig up a fossil, or
date the age of a rock on Earth, you are using evidence
to flesh out another part of the timeline of the Earth's geological history.
Or the fascinating march of the revolutionary epic.
Similarly, by looking at the documents from the middle ages or
digging up human artifacts from ancient times,
you were finding evidence that flushes out the narrative of our human past.
When we investigate politics or media, we are looking for
evidence to flush out the narrative of our own times.
In both the case of science and
the humanities, we have theorists who try to interpret that events.
Often interpretations differ, but theorists still endeavor to arrive at
the clearest picture of how phenomena in nature and human society came to be.
To enhance our understanding of how things work, enabling us to innovate To
make each others lives better, and to tackle the problems of the future.