Omnology

....the process of developing a greater picture by incorporating knowledge from all scientific disciplines.

The Roots of Omnology by Howard Bloom

Omnology — “an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline that concentrates on seeing the patterns that emerge when one views all the sciences and the arts at once.”

Back in 2001, I wrote a manifesto for a new discipline, “Omnology,” a field for those with a gaggle of curiosities and with the potential to use their multiple intellectual and artistic hungers to provide unusual perspectives to the scientific community.

At least two major figures tried to establish their own forms of omnology in the 19th century. One was Herbert Spencer, who devoted his life to the creation of a Grand Synthesis that encompassed all the sciences. The other was William Whewell, who took on every science that his mind and curiosity could comprehend, then demonstrated his “omnicompetence” by showing his own insight into each field and by exploring the big-picture linkage between the narrowly specializing disciplines. Whewell was called a metascientist by historian Richard Yeo and a “universal scientist” by encyclopedist of the history of ideas Glenn M. Sanford.

Would the term “omnologist” have allowed Whewell and Spencer to lay a path for synthesis as a necessary function of science and for the synthesist as a key contributor’s to science’s digestive process? Perhaps. But without a term other than “polymath” to describe what Spencer and Whewell attempted, others with a broad range of curiosities were left to flounder for the next century and a half.

But it’s the synthesists who often see the set of questions…and answers…over the next horizon. Darwin, Freud, Einstein, Mandelbrot, and even Newton were wildly unconventional synthesists, linking elements they found in the nooks and crannies of many obscure…and not so obscure…specialties.

If Omnology can be established as a legitimate discipline, my hope is that kids with promiscuous creativity will be told that their multiple enthusiasms are their gifts, not their liabilities. My hope is that those who have a taste for big-picture syntheses will be added to the community of legitimate scientists, given their own dignity, given their own budgets, given their own made-to-order, cross-disciplinary degree programs and will be recognized for their contributions.

We are blessed with a richness of specializations, but cursed with a paucity of panoptic disciplines-categories of knowledge that concentrate on seeing the pattern that emerges when one views all the sciences at once. Hence we need a field dedicated to the panoramic, an academic base for the promiscuously curious, a discipline whose mandate is best summed up in a paraphrase of the poet Andrew Marvel: Let us roll all our strength and all Our knowledge up into one ball, And tear our visions with rough strife Through the iron gates of life.

Omnology is a science, but one dedicated to the biggest picture conceivable by the minds of its practitioners. Omnology will use every conceptual tool available-and some not yet invented but inventible-to leapfrog over disciplinary barriers, stitching together the patchwork quilt of science and all the rest that humans can yet know. If one omnologist is able to perceive the relationship between pop songs, ancient Egyptian graffiti, Shirley MacLaine's mysticism, neurobiology, and the origins of the cosmos, so be it. If another uses mathematics to probe traffic patterns, the behavior of insect colonies, and the manner in which galaxies cluster in swarms, wonderful. And if another uses introspection to uncover hidden passions and relate them to research in chemistry, anthropology, psychology, history, and the arts, she, too, has a treasured place on the wild frontiers of scientific truth-the terra incognita in the heartland of omnology.

Let me close with the words of yet another poet, William Blake, on the ultimate goal of omnology:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand And a Heaven in a Wild Flower, Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand And Eternity in an hour.