This is a post that shows the output of a simple program I wrote to see if interesting new scientific professions/fields of study can be generated/revealed by a very basic combinatorics experiment.
The idea is very simple and straightforward: take existing branches of science (names) and generate new combinations to see if interesting new fields may arise.
Why? I have a suspicion that many new fields are waiting to be discovered, and many fields that now exist as commonplace were once not even fathomed, and if so, likely considered silly or irrelevant. So anyway, let’s see what happened.
Inputs
First, let’s consider the inputs that I’m going to use. I did a quick search on Google for “list of scienctific fields” and got to a nice, uniform list on Wikipedia here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Index_of_branches_of_science.
I then prepped that for python, and wrote a simple program – all of which can be seen here: https://gist.github.com/christabor/264386fe5fd9e1b0412a41659b994769.
You can run it yourself, (just download the single python file, and from command line, run python path/to/downloaded/file.py) to see new results.
If you wanted to combine more than one field, you could tune the itertools.permutations argument to where r=XXX is much higher, but this will very quickly crash your computer since if the number is more than 4 (probably even 3) as it converts the results to a list which will automatically allocate all the required memory to create 6294 combinations (156531800881) - so probably don’t do that.
Anyway, enjoy! Hopefully you found it potentially insightful, or at least comical!