The intersection of philosophy and science
As someone who has academically dabbled in multiple different academic topics, I have realized the importance of cross-field collaboration to make significant insights. I started in undergrad as an Engineering Physics major. The program I was in was a small joint program, where I was supposed to do 3 years at my first university and then transfer and two 2 years at a different school to finish my upper division engineering electives. For these first few years I took mostly physics and math courses, and really began to develop my foundational problem solving skills that would be necessary later on. There was some really interesting concepts we learned: forces, momentum, electricity, magnetism, optics, modern physics, and so on. However, as I progressed in my academic career I began to realize that the actual content of my classes were not the most important part. The most important part was being introduced to new topics, absorbing them and being able to solve problems within that context. I am fairly certain I will never need to know optics, modern physics, or many of the tools I learned for my future career, but the important part was that I learned how to think critically in a concrete way.
As I continued to study, I started to realize some of my branching interests, and I decided to minor in mathematics and philosophy, both of which I have now finished. I realized that I enjoyed some of the more theoretical side of science, and that I enjoyed manipulating expressions to find out what was true and coming to a conclusion that I knew was true. Even if the conclusion was not intuitive to me, I knew I could trust it because I was careful with each individual step. It was fascinating to see that although philosophy is one of the humanities and physics is a science, there were so many overlapping themes between them that would come up in both of my classes. For example, in my modern physics class, we had an assignment to consider one of the concepts we had learned (relativity, for instance) and discuss the philosophical implications of it. Einstein was named the most influential person of the last century by TIME magazine because his discovery made a profound impact not just on science applications but on people’s worldviews and paradigms of how they see everything. Up until that point, everyone saw the universe as a very structured, uniform and objective place. Then Einstein’s theory of relativity demonstrated that different people could observe quantitatively different things from different perspectives. This revelation that the universe may not be objective rocked peoples worlds. If the laws of the universe were not objective, is anything objective? Is ethics and morality objective, or subjective? Science can have a significant impact on everything even outside of the physical world.
I think it is absolutely fascinating that two seemingly separate fields can have so much overlap. I certainly did not expect that going into my philosophy minor, but as I continued to delve into it I learned that many philosophers had studied the hard sciences before going onto philosophy. Both subjects made me better at the other, and I am convinced that integrating knowledge from different fields is essential to making substantial breakthroughs.
