GRE Issue: "The university community consists of three different worlds�the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. Because each world operates on its own assumptions and has its own special habits of thinking, rarely is there meaningful interaction among the sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences."

My Response Essay:

If we look back sufficiently long in history, we find that all of these three fields were unitedly called "philosophy". Since then, several transformations have taken place whose result is in front of us in the form of different well defined areas of study. Even now, it has not been possible to completely segregate these fields and we find that in practice, variegated mammoth projects require contributions from each of these "worlds".

To begin with, the assumptions and habits of thinking in the realm of sciences, humanities and social sciences may not be mutually exclusive. For example, the scholars belonging to any of these fields do not subscribe to the idea of yielding to conformity without demur and have a drive to innovate -- to find or establish which was hitherto unknown or inexplicable. Worth mentioning here are the achievements of Einstein, Picasso and Marx. Each of them was discontented with the prevalent themes or theories. Einstein took several concepts from theoretical physics to logical culmination by proving their consistency with empirical observations, Picasso strived to come out of the mould that painters of his time were supposed to conform to and successfully did, and Marx, realizing the need for an overhaul in the system of governance, put forth the idea of communism.

Also, it is unwarranted to declare that there is little or no meaningful interaction among these fields. Let us consider how we obtain the knowledge of previous civilizations. While doing this, the learned from each of these fields play significant roles in their own right. An archeologist may give insights to how this newly discovered civilization is related to other known ones, a linguist may help understand the remnant writings that are unearthed, and a scientist may help determine, using carbon dating, how old the civilization has been and how long it lasted.



Another area where such a collaboration becomes of paramount importance is space exploration. We need electrical, mechanical and computer engineers to design robust space vehicles which can transport humans to another planet, or better which can be sent without any human being and serve to achieve the observation and analysis intended or bring the samples of foreign material required. At the same time, we need paleontologists and chemists to analyze these samples to know whether a habitable environment existed on that planet, or if one can be developed easily. Then we also need experts from humanities to analyse ethical consequences such explorations may have. Moreover, such programmes are of a scale on which a collaboration of different countries is indispensable and hence humanities aspect comes to the fore.

One more recent example of such areas is Brain Computer Interface. This area is concerned with establishing a channel of communication between human brain and a conventional computer. It has far reaching implications in medical as well as commercial arena. And it requires expertise of psyschologists to understand what areas of brain respond in different situations and what are likely patterns to be observed, of electronics engineers to design robust interface so that brain signals can be captured with minimal loss of information, and of computer engineers to employ the best algorithms to extract the brain's intentions from the collected data.

It will not be apt to say that the university community consists of three different worlds of sciences, humanities and social sciences. Rather these are the three foundation pillars of university and they interact with each other meaningfully to achieve the purpose of the university i.e. to serve human society. There are many areas of inquiry that require meaningful interaction from each of the three fields. Had they been completely unrelated, it is questionable why they would have been part of the same educational structure.

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