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[QUOTE=TGS;1007981]To take the second part first: I suspect scientists are not very interested in explaining everything. Most seem content to operate within their regional ontologies, some explore the edges of those ontologies but only to see what falls within their boundaries.
/QUOTE]
You can be surer than just suspecting. There are many varieties of scientists, none of them dare to dream to explain everything. Most of them indeed operate in regional ontologies, and the biggest part of those in subregional ontologies. Some, though, operate in multidisciplinary domains. This is the inside parlance for macro-regional ontologies. It has become quite in fashion and fruitful after the advent of powerful computing, after the 2nd world war and the availability of powerful computing and then the semiconductor era.
For the hard sciences it has been a golden age, interdisciplinary research has given to many the sensation of a new Renaissance. Now Progress is presenting its bill again. For a young person, however gifted, to start operating in any field of hard science entails a very high entry point, and a very long period of apprentice: there is so much to acquire before being original. This narrows the scope, inevitably. Therefore we go toward smaller and smaller domains.
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