We physicists could learn a lot by stepping beyond our specialisms

A century ago, it was possible for a physicist to know almost everything there was to know about physics. Now, this is far from the case. It isn’t that the physicists of today are less competent. The problem is that humans simply know so much about the inner workings of the universe that it is impossible for someone to be deeply familiar with all of it. As a result, today’s tendency is to produce specialists.

For example, I trained initially as a relativist: general relativity and quantum extensions of it, applied to cosmology, were my specialist areas of physics. Eventually,…