Most recently I completed the book “The Fabric of reality” by David Deutsch. It is a challenging read. The book explains and promotes a whole new world view – anchored on several very fundamental discoveries over more than a century. It was published in 1997 – so quite a while ago. Looking at the bibliography I found references for a number of quoted supporting publications that go back to the seventies, eighties and nineties of the last century. For example, a book “The selfish gene” published in 1976 by Dawkins is referenced. Richard Dawkins for example, expanded Darwin’s theory of evolution.
I finished college in 1988 (This gives my age away!) and in the early courses we spent some time studying philosophy before diving deep into chemistry and physics. The interplay of different disciplines of science including mathematics, and others like crystallography, for example with chemistry and physics was illustrated along the way. The course materials touched on publications and books but in my recollection many of these were not as recent. Some were and in that case often illustrating scientific research in the context of modern applications.
I believe in lifelong learning. Up to this point much of it was driven by the new technologies that became available in our work life – personal computers, the internet, smart phones with lots of apps and now tools driven by artificial intelligence. Along with using these new tools we expanded our knowledge in our immediate technical field – with applied research to solve problems in the manufacturing of semiconductor devices. That included participation in conferences and journals. But I never took the time to revisit the progress in the foundational sciences in the way we pursued them in college. I am curious now how my former colleagues handled that process. Even the selected bibliography referenced in Deutsch’s writing has a broad range of books listed. Is it even feasible to read all these and many others in adjacent fields that describe progress in their respective areas? How much has been published since? The benefit of college is a curated path of knowledge acquisition accompanied by sampled reading focused on the prevailing and validated theories in each field. Too late for a re-entry and I am inspired to continue reading!