A world full of brave new ideas

LAST week's research assessments show that despite complaints of limited resources, many British academics are doing terrific research. This week and next, The THES is looking at where the best researchers in the arts and sciences will be concentrating their efforts in the run-up to the millennium. The message seems clear: disciplines are gaining fresh insights at an exciting pace and informing each other in ways that promise new forms of intellectual progress.

In the humanities and social sciences, the subject of this week's articles, there are big shifts. Critical theory and its allies are losing their hegemony and acceptance that Margaret Mead's seminal work on Samoan teenage sex was bogus (page 19) has profound implications.

A few weeks after the death of Raphael Samuel, who introduced the idea that the study of "everyday" lives should be as rigorous as that of monarchs and parliaments, it is appropriate to note that history and sociology are converging in their output if not in their methods.

The two are, of course, distinct. History is a document-based subject and most historians study people long dead. But while it is learning to be more accessible, sociologists could profit from being reminded of the value of data and data analysis. With new fields, such as masculinity (page 21), emerging, there will need to be new methods of handling them. Sociology's traditional subject matter - race, class, sexuality and the like - makes particle physics look straightforward. But if it does not find a way to say something useful about how people interact, somebody else will.

Economists (somewhat reluctantly in Britain), historians (more enthusiastically), anthropologists (perhaps) and geographers (the biggest subject imperialists of all) are to the fore among the pretenders.

Next week The THES will be looking at the sciences. Here determinism seems to rule. Ideas will emerge from new and gleaming machines deep inside the Earth, in orbit or in deep space. The Hubble Space Telescope, one of the most successful scientific instruments ever, has shown that looking at the universe in a different way can change patterns of thought as well as information.

One of 1996's other sad academic deaths, that of Carl Sagan, reminds us of his observation that we are the generation within whose lifetimes the planets have turned from little-known dots in the sky to familiar worlds. Missions to Mars and Saturn will emphasise the point just as experiments in particle physics will dig deeper into the origin of matter. The steady progress of the human genome programme is generating understanding of inherited disease and human potential. Biology faces other challenges from such policy issues as BSE or perceived social problems, such as the increase in neurodegenerative disease as more people survive into old age.

The scale of these challenges, from poverty to climate change, makes a strong case for action-based research in all subjects from chemistry to political science. The excitement will come as much from new ways of looking at things as from new knowledge.