Preserving Principles as Scientific Fields Divide

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Many of the improvements to sustainability originate as advancements in STEM. New techniques, materials, designs, and processes offer better efficiency and less waste, helping to reduce environmental impacts, especially when those concepts are integrated across the economy to a substantial degree. The significant upside from a massive push of STEM education will come with new challenges as well though.

With sufficient advancement and complexity, scientific fields divide, resulting in many niche areas of inquiry. As the process unfolds, there’s a diminishing number of people in each field who can grasp and debate new concepts, and can reject or expand on them. Quantum computing, nuclear engineering, and robotics have progressed well into this bottleneck, as evidenced by the substantial deficit of capable applicants compared to job openings. These fields are highly technical, conceptually demanding, and multidisciplinary, causing their labor pool shortfalls.

It's concerning how few people will understand the principles propelling an advanced field to its achievements, and why certain principles and processes worked. With a limited number of experts, the causes and conditions producing the field’s achievements could be lost or misunderstood. The population would execute processes and enjoy the benefits but would be ignorant of the enabling principles, and incapable of advancing the field beyond its high-water mark.

Alexis de Tocqueville suggests a cause, and identifies the result of losing touch with foundations, noting that, “by dint of close adherence to mere applications, principles would be lost sight of; and when the principles were wholly forgotten…new methods could no longer be invented and men would continue to apply, without intelligence, and without art, scientific processes no longer understood.” Despite the risk of being separated from the causes of our advancement, there are ways to prevent being disconnected.

For example, modern media distribution and scientific outlets make it possible to spread knowledge now and in the future. Combining niches to make new fields, as quantum computing does, is effective because it synthesizes separate bodies of information, instead of insisting on advancing singular fields. The best safeguard though, is a population that is scientifically literate, and can contribute across multiple fields. Maintaining progress on environmental issues depends on the ability to continue building on existing foundations, without losing sight of how the layers below were set down.