Rebuilding the Polymath

This is a Manifesto. A manifesto that looks back and looks forward, back to the world of the robber barons and the polymaths, to creative geniuses whose idle speculations gave us everything from Calculus to the lightning rod, to people who, through their ability to think broadly and move seamlessly among disparate fields built the foundations on which much of our civilization sits. It also looks forward to the Big Science and Big Industry that replaced them, to the system of Systems that has guided us forward since the Manhattan Project taught us the joys of the research lab. From all this looking it seeks to draw a conclusion, that in giving up one we have severely hindered the other -- that in creating a world where specialization and concentration in education, in work, and in thinking has utterly obliterated the sort of broad minded tinkering and ethic of learning that helped build our society, we have begun to undermine innovation itself.