Question
What is the literature that one should read in order to get a broad scientific background?
Answer
Your question and link suggest that you don't quite understand what you are asking for. The link is to "polymath" with Leonardo Da Vinci held up as an archetype. You are asking what to "read" to understand math/physics/biology/chemistry/statistics/philosophy.
The problem is that you are approaching these science subjects as if they were places on a tourist map that you can visit. You think you can "go there" and "read" just as you would go to Rome and visit the Collosseum.
What's more, you think you can read them in "self-contained" ways which suggest that you think there is something fundamental about containers like "physics." It's again an unconscious tourist metaphor. If it's Tuesday, it must be Brussels. If it's Tuesday, it must be Physics.
If you approach the question this way, you won't end up a polymath. You'll end up being erudite. Erudition is uncreative knowledge tourism. It's coloring inside the lines. It is vicarious experience of dead knowledge. It is looking over others' shoulders. The erudite can usually do nothing of consequence.
An erudite person is basically a glorified tourist. A true polymath is a globe-trotting mover-and-shaker at the global level. Would you call somebody who has merely spent a year traveling around the world an expert on globalization?
I wrote about the dangers of seeking erudition in this post:http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
If that's what you want, you should also invest in an oak-paneled library, grow a nicely-trimmed beard and sport glasses. Learn to speak in a slow, deep voice full of gravitas.
To become a true polymath, you need to stop thinking of "reading" an abstract map of subjects and think in terms of "doing."
Polymaths redraw maps of knowledge by doing valuable new things that force a refactoring of the known. The merely erudite huff and puff and try to keep up, hopelessly praying at the altar of obsolete maps.
Because they don't get that knowledge is not a place to explore. It is a process of creative destruction to be experienced.
These 2 books may help (warning: old post, my views have shifted since):
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/0...
The problem is that you are approaching these science subjects as if they were places on a tourist map that you can visit. You think you can "go there" and "read" just as you would go to Rome and visit the Collosseum.
What's more, you think you can read them in "self-contained" ways which suggest that you think there is something fundamental about containers like "physics." It's again an unconscious tourist metaphor. If it's Tuesday, it must be Brussels. If it's Tuesday, it must be Physics.
If you approach the question this way, you won't end up a polymath. You'll end up being erudite. Erudition is uncreative knowledge tourism. It's coloring inside the lines. It is vicarious experience of dead knowledge. It is looking over others' shoulders. The erudite can usually do nothing of consequence.
An erudite person is basically a glorified tourist. A true polymath is a globe-trotting mover-and-shaker at the global level. Would you call somebody who has merely spent a year traveling around the world an expert on globalization?
I wrote about the dangers of seeking erudition in this post:http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/0...
If that's what you want, you should also invest in an oak-paneled library, grow a nicely-trimmed beard and sport glasses. Learn to speak in a slow, deep voice full of gravitas.
To become a true polymath, you need to stop thinking of "reading" an abstract map of subjects and think in terms of "doing."
Polymaths redraw maps of knowledge by doing valuable new things that force a refactoring of the known. The merely erudite huff and puff and try to keep up, hopelessly praying at the altar of obsolete maps.
Because they don't get that knowledge is not a place to explore. It is a process of creative destruction to be experienced.
These 2 books may help (warning: old post, my views have shifted since):
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2007/0...