The divide between the natural sciences and the humanities and social sciences in the West is a recent one. Newton considered himself a ‘natural philosopher’, Thomas Hobbes thought that one of his greatest achievements was laying the foundations of optics, and Margaret Cavendish was the author of one of the first works of science fiction and the first woman to attend a meeting of the Royal Society. More recently, the space between the so-called STEM (‘science, technology, engineering and mathematics’) disciplines and the humanities and social and behavioural sciences has widened, until we have come to see them as islands without bridges.
