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Monday, January 05, 2009

Knowledge is inter-related

I do not know who said this first - "Knowledge is inter-related", I heard this most of the times from Dr. Vijay Gokhale sir.

When I learned "Fluid mechanics" first our teachers/ books used to give analogy of Electric current to understand flow of fluid.
Voltage is analogous to head
Flow rate is analogous to current
so on...

Before that in 11-12th class I had taken Electrical technology as optional subject, in ET class our teacher used to tell us that - to understand how current flows take example of water flow (fluid flow :)).

After that almost 6 years after studying fluid mechanics and ET etc. subjects I went to class for UNIX, and Gokhale sir told us "Unix Operating system is analogous to mother", study of study operating system is study of mother!

In my engineering days I read one book on Thermodynamics (Authors - Cengel and Boles) - in this book the concept of entropy and process efficiency is explained by giving analogy or ordered person (low entropy so more efficient) and dis-ordered person (more entropy so less efficient). I have not understood some other theories but some authors prove entropy with help of statistics.

Coming back to the original point - "Knowledge is inter-related".

I think some long long time back there must be a concept of scholar who is expert in every field (rather I will call him as a generic expert). Then as humans became more and more knowledgeable they started feeling a need of subject expert. Then the generic expert started getting known by the profession they are specialised in. People started calling the expert in health and medicine as Doctor, expert in machinery and construction as engineer and the experts who were interested in social service became politicians. Then I think people started differentiating in between these experts and they formed opinion that Dr. only knows about health and medicine and the engineer only about construction and machinery, time passed and in the run of time these experts really became subject experts, they forgot that they are scholars. Dr.s stopped studying engineering (it was not their subject) and engineers stopped learning things related to health and medicine.

On today's date when I go to Dental surgeon he cant give me medicine on heart and the heart specialist cant be consulted for kidney disease. Civil engineer do not know about automobiles and automotive engineer is dumb in problems of Power plant.

I think computers are bridging this gap now a days. Unfortunately they are also distinguished as Mac OS for artits, Linux for developers, UNIX for administrators, Windows for layman and so on.

I think a day will come when all these diversed experts will find need to learn the others subject to become a scholar. For example if I am mechanical engineer working on sit-system crash analysis and I udnerstand the rib-structure very well!! and the same mechanical engineer if s/he understands the FEA algorithms which are doing the simulation behind the scenes!!! and s/he also understands the one should be proactive - no need for managers in this world!!.
A day will come when religious scholars will understand that what is said by Shree-Krishna in Bhagwad geeta is same as the what Jejus said in Bible and what Mohammad paigambar said in Kuran. There will be no war on the name of religion!!

I hope and I pray that day will come.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You are not just talking of the Analogies, but pointing to an existing Logic.NET for the philosophies :)

Ashish Sarode said...
This comment has been removed by the author.