So the 2016 QS subject rankings are out. There has been a mild controversy about TCD communications with people who might respond to the survey on which much of the ranking is rated, but nonetheless the story overall is worth examining.
Here is a really interesting post on medieval cosmology : Cosmology: Unearthing a 13th-century metaverse | The Economist. which shows that really, the two sides of modern universities cant work in Iisolation.
In essence the project which is reported took the work of a 13C philosopher and applied modern mathematical concepts. What they found was rather startling. The medieval model gave rise to a metaverse, universes existing parallel to each other.
How is all this related to the STEM debate? To succeed, the Ordered Universe Project needed a team spanning both science and the humanities: physics, Latin studies, philosophy, cosmology, philology, medieval studies, paleography, history of science, psychophysics and linguistics. The humanities scholars uncovered insights into Grosseteste’s work that scientists alone might have missed; the scientists helped identify mathematical, physical and geometrical thinking in De Luce that their peers in the humanities might have overlooked. Professor McLeish says that without its interdisciplinary approach—an apparent novelty that has made funding a challenge—the project would not have been possible: “If you’d let the scientists loose on their own, we’d have come up with nonsense.
Makes you think when we see the cuts in relative funding for AHSS versus STEM ; what else are we missing?
Brian M. Lucey 