Humanity’s most difficult challenges—from artificial intelligence and climate change to health, migration, the global economy and the future of democracy—cannot be addressed by a single discipline. Against a backdrop of geopolitical tensions, shrinking research budgets and growing barriers to international academic exchange, the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) aims to bring scientists, social scientists and humanities scholars together in Berlin for sustained, curiosity-driven collaboration.
Why science needs the humanities now more than ever
Research and scholarship increasingly depend on cooperation between nations. Yet most academic institutions are organized around departments, disciplines, funding systems and established research agendas. These structures provide essential coherence, but they can also limit ideas that do not fit neatly within existing boundaries.
Many interdisciplinary organizations operate around the world, including institutions that have long promoted transnational cultures. However, most focus on a particular field or research topic and do not necessarily bring researchers together in person as a group for an extended period.
Einstein test: What happens when AI tries to rediscover the theory of relativity?
Addressing global challenges rapidly will require the kind of cross-disciplinary thinking that helped produce fields such as quantum mechanics, general relativity, behavioral economics, systems biology and artificial intelligence.
That means creating opportunities for collaboration across the sciences, social sciences and humanities, as well as forums where researchers can work together for months at a time.
To support this goal, the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, the Max Planck Society in Munich, Germany, and the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot, Israel, have joined to establish ARC. The institutions are explaining the program and encouraging academics to apply for participation next year and beyond.
Freedom to think
ARC was launched in Berlin on October 22. Its mission is to promote curiosity-driven basic research by giving promising collaborators the conditions they need to pursue innovative work and develop important ideas.
Researchers from the sciences, social sciences and humanities will meet in person in working groups, setting aside their usual responsibilities to pursue self-selected, ambitious problems with the potential to cross traditional academic and intellectual boundaries. Collaboration is the program’s central requirement.
ARC will be based at the historic Otto Warburg House, which was built for Nobel laureates. Participating scholars will stay nearby.
Physicists refined quantum theory during discussions at the Solvay Conference in Brussels in 1927.Credit: Science History Images/Alamy
The consortium will have no full-time faculty and no predetermined research agenda. Instead of requiring researchers to fit their questions into existing institutional structures, ARC will build its structures around researchers’ ideas. Its direction will therefore evolve continuously in response to participants and the questions they raise.
This flexible model is intended to give scholars from around the world the time and freedom to pursue ambitious research that might not otherwise take root in traditional academic settings.
ARC is not intended simply to create additional sabbatical opportunities or to place talented researchers in the same building. Its purpose is to temporarily remove participants from the daily demands of their professions and put them in close proximity to other leading thinkers, with the goal of enabling ambitious collaborations.
The outcomes cannot and should not be defined in advance. They could include discoveries, innovative methods, unexpected collaborations, or entirely new questions and ideas whose importance may not become clear for years.
Investing in the unknown
ARC plans to introduce its program over the next year through two research tracks designed for different stages of intellectual exploration. Exploratory programs will bring together small groups of up to six researchers for as long as four weeks. These focused meetings will allow participants to propose and develop new ideas, then decide whether a question merits deeper investigation.
The core program will support longer-term collaborations lasting up to one year, with as many as 20 researchers participating at any given time.
ARC will also offer postdoctoral fellowships for early-career scientists. The program is intended to help fellows build long-term connections and collaborations that could shape the course of their research. It will support up to 10 researchers each year for four years, provide a full postdoctoral salary and require fellows to divide their time between two of the three founding institutions.
As ARC develops, additional programs may be created to support new forms of collaboration.
The consortium will fully fund participants for the duration of their stay in Berlin. ARC is supported financially by its three founding institutions, each of which contributed funds to establish the program. As the partnership develops, philanthropic support will be essential to fund additional research projects.
Source: www.nature.com