"Academic disciplines have become so specialized in recent years that scholars' ideas reach only a narrow audience. Until scholars can reach a wider audience, their ideas will have little use."
... my student years, I had a mathematics teacher that developed a very efficient method for solving linear equations, and in fact that method was well known in my university and called “The Mountain Method”, named after him. During the visit of a professor from a German University, he expressed his admiration for such a brilliant development and confirmed that it was an original creation. Unfortunately, his brilliant idea was only known by the scholars of his department (and the german professor), and nobody else knew about it. In this case, even that this method was highly efficient, it could be considered useless, since only few people benefited from it. If his idea had reached a wider audience, like the professors of the economics department, or from other departments that use this branch of mathematics for their models, this would have been considered a great discovery at a worldwide level. On the other hand, let’s consider the case of the nuclear energy. With applications in these days like power generation (and unfortunately also used in the war), we can say that the ideas behind the nuclear energy are extensively used in our times. But if we ask the lay person if they understand the principles behind it or if we ask them the meaning of the famous Einstein’s equation E=MC2, they probably won’t be able to answer it. Here we can see that is not necessary that the common man knows or understands the principles developed by the scholars of nuclear physics to make this invention useful to our race. Also let’s take a household item, like the cell phones. Even though everybody uses them or at least knows they exist, very few people know about the theories developed by ...