A genius with the widest of interests, Galileo Galilei was so much more than an astronomer.
Musician, philosopher, inventor, artist, engineer, mathematician, physicist, designer and superb writer. The ultimate polymath. Einstein described him as the father of modern science. A total “renaissance man” (as they say nowadays).
The question is: what might Galileo have studied in today’s siloed university system, where narrow specialisation is the norm? A handful of universities, including City in London, now offer some exciting interdisciplinary courses, but it’s mostly the students who get the benefit of these, not really the teaching staff. There seems to be minimal communication - even between disciplines that appear to be adjacent to each other, like music and musicology.
Would he have been accepted in the first place? And if he had been, and had gone on to pursue a postgraduate path, would he have produced a quarter of what he eventually achieved?
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