Researchers practice their trade within disciplines (such as mathematics, biology, sociology, physics, and so forth), but they are often faced with problems that can only be solved by drawing on multiple disciplines (such as those concerning the climate, materials science, ecology, and urban planning). For this reason, interdisciplinarity, or research practice at the interface of several disciplines, has gradually become an important tool in research strategies, particularly at the CNRS (French National Centre for Scientific Research), a multidisciplinary institution par excellence —, as CNRS chairman and CEO Antoine Petit aptly notes in the preface to this book on interdisciplinarity.
The book is structured into eight large sections, each highlighting interdisciplinary research on a specific theme. The first tackles “Observing and Measuring,” a fundamental part of a great deal of research, and provides some examples of the joint use of experimental techniques employed in ...
