Neal Stephenson re specialization
"To be interested in too many things is not conducive to professional advancement in the sciences today. You can’t write a general Ph.D. dissertation. You have to pick something very specific. What does happen from time to time is that you’ll have one scientist working on a very specific problem in one field, and another working on what seems to be an altogether different problem in another field, and somehow a spark will jump between them and they’ll end up writing a joint paper.
"Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize “enthusiasts” (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years."
Neal Stephenson
http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml
"Freeman Dyson and his son George Dyson are two people with extraordinarily broad scope. Beyond that, it is difficult to generalize. One encounters high-tech geeks, lawyers, ministers, businesspeople, soldiers, and construction workers who have made themselves extremely erudite by reading a lot of history, science, and philosophy. In an earlier era, people like these might have gravitated to the Royal Society, and indeed one of the many remarkable things about the early Royal Society was its ability to gather in such people, combined with its ability to identify and marginalize “enthusiasts” (cranks) while fostering the ones who had something to contribute. Modern-day scientific institutions tend to value specialization. But that is an unavoidable consequence of the advancement that has taken place in all sciences in the last 350 years."
Neal Stephenson
http://www.reason.com/0502/fe.mg.neal.shtml