🍎your Scholarly Digest 3rd April, 2025

Academia essentials hand-picked fortnightly for the mindful scholar

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Hi Scholar,

If there’s a common thread running through this week’s Digest, it’s this: science and scholarship thrive on openness: of thought, of imagination, of borders.

Whether it’s Warren Weaver urging science to move beyond reductionism and embrace complexity, Isaac Asimov writing about creativity as the ability to connect ideas others wouldn’t dare to, or a poetry competition inviting us to turn research into verse - each piece makes the case for thinking differently, for opening up new ways of knowing.

And yet, against this backdrop of imaginative possibility, we’re faced with a political climate doing the opposite. The USA yesterday imposed tariffs on its trading partners, which may seem like a bureaucratic footnote, but they’re part of a larger trend: a closing in, a stifling of the very conditions that allow knowledge to breathe. When collaboration becomes harder, when mobility is restricted, our knowledge production suffers.

So this week’s Digest is a kind of double exposure: one image of the world as it could be - curious, bold, interconnected, and another of the obstacles standing in its way.

BRAIN FOOD

Science and Complexity

Any scientist worthy of the title accepts that there are limits to what we can know, and that knowledge always depends on certain conditions being met. And yet, despite this formal allegiance, many scientists find it difficult to fully reconcile with these principles in practice, often regarding their knowledge as providing the ‘correct’ or ultimately ‘rational’ solution to problems. These tensions were not lost on the mathematician Warren Weaver.

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