Exercises marked with (*) require further reading/search beyond the suggested texts.
10. (*) Is sir Isaac Newton indirectly referred to in the article?
Answer:
The author of "Antedisciplinary Science" implies that interdisciplinary people are good in compressing knowledge and make it useful for new people in the respective area, thus creating "a taller set of giants’ shoulders to stand on". This phrase is famous because it's written in one of Isaac Newton's letters: "if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants" [1], acknowledging that the major part of his success was due to the work of scientists who preceded him. The metaphor of dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants expresses the meaning of "discovering truth by building on previous discoveries" as "a dwarf on a giant's shoulders sees farther of the two" [2].
References:
[1] Letter from Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke, 5 February 1676, as
transcribed in Jean-Pierre Maury (1992) Newton: Understanding the Cosmos,
New Horizons.
[2] Wikipedia: Standing on the shoulders of giants.
© 2015 Joao Meidanis