In my opinion, the divide between sciences and humanities is not absolute. The shared human language unites the two cultures like the language of genetic code unites all living forms.

...Conductivity, wavelength, voltage, electrophoresis......temperature, entropy, energy, order........class struggle, revolution, domination......gene, meme, DNA, selection ........virtue, happiness, suffering, duty, love, perfection...

The vocabulary of sciences and humanities spreads from narrow and highly special terms of natural sciences, like tensor, mitochondria, and quark, to the words of strictly humanitarian usage, like guilt and hubris (they might be appropriated by physics in the future).

At some historical point, a word of the common language (for example, charge, decay, resistance) was selected as a scientific term, usually, for the reason of analogy. Other scientific terms were originally invented for internal use, but later infiltrated humanities and common language (entropy, diffusion, algorithm) for the same reason.  Latin and Greek roots went both ways, retaining their general meaning. Thus, the Latin posse (have power), gave potential, power, possibility, and impotence).
 

I believe that if there is a substance of the unified knowledge, it is analogy and metaphor. I believe that at a certain level of abstraction, a large picture of the world can appear, which we cannot see by using narrow terms. Accordingly, if we use either wide and vague or exact but very abstract terms, we cannot see the details of the picture. It is a tradeoff. We are not trained to see the whole because our education and division of mental labor reflects the historic evolution of knowledge with its diversification and specialization into philosophy, literature, physics, biology, and thousands of narrow strips.

Human nature, living nature, and physical nature are separated only in our mind. For an observer from Mars, they both are the Nature of the Earth, but only because of a big distance.

 
Charge, energy, power, speed, acceleration, resistance, competition, even culture (microbiology and anthropology), strange and charmed (quarks), together with scores of other words, are in common use by both sciences and humanities. Although theoretical physics tends to break with analogy, even the color of quarks is not just a nostalgic artifact of sensual perception but a meaningful analogy with the three basic colors.

The unified picture of the world is in the state of a permanent growth, like a regenerating tissue covering the lesion. To watch pieces of this jigsaw picture join and fuse has been my major single passion. Strangely, the picture has been getting only simpler with time. But you can never make money on anything simple except aspirin, and the adepts of a unified world picture will crouch somewhere below the English Major.

There is another ambidextrous concept that overstepped the divide from the humanities to natural sciences: complexity.

It seems that the complexity of modern life is as oppressive as a humid hot July day in a big city. Simple living  becomes a dream, but a related Web site looks like a window into complexity.

Regulations, laws, rules, tax code, OSHA and EPA requirements, paperwork, documentation, bureaucracy, special interests, political correctness, politics, economy, technology, computers, programming, education, science, air transportation, parking space, ethnic fragmentation, ethnic sensitivity, world community, international relations, police activity, globalization, dealing with protesters, Arab-Israeli conflict, ethics of medical research, spread of AIDS, religious influence on secular life, and countless other issues are components of modern complexity.

Fortunately, the growth of complexity is partially offset by its loss. Thus, the relations between people seem to drift toward simplification. The loss of loyalty, for example, takes a good deal of complexity fall off our shoulders. The topic of the loss, however, better suits a separate essay (see Essay 34. On Loss).

We can certainly solve all the problems, except finding parking space downtown, by having a czar with full power for every problem that cannot be solved by a town meeting. We would simply overturn any czar who acts against  majority. Social complexity, therefore, displays between the simplicity of  absolute dictatorship and an ultimate democracy.

What is complexity? What is more complex and what is less so? How to measure it?

The subject turns out to be very complex. Complexity today means:

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   Page created: 2001                                                     Revised: 2016