今天，在去青岛的高铁上，看完了这本Peter Burke从时间、空间、社会发展阶段等角度对欧美博学者（polymath）进行归类梳理的书。作者的出发点很高，有点像研究综述，泛泛而谈，对广度与深度、局部与整体的平衡没有处理好。如果作者能有茨威格的语言功力，以《人类的群星闪耀时》风格书写，或许可读性更强，但这毕竟不是作者所追求的，正像艾萨克森只挑选个别的polymath为其作传。

It … focuses on the long-term consequences of what might be called two crises of knowledge, the first in the middle of the seventeenth century and the second in the middle of the nineteenth, both of them responses to the proliferation of books (it is still too early to predict the long-term consequences of a third crisis, following the digital revolution). All three crises produced what might be called ‘explosions’ of knowledge, in the sense of both rapid expansion and fragmentation.

Peter Burke认为the knowledge explosion既意味着知识的快速扩张（迷宫），也意味着知识的碎片化（孤岛），正在对polymath的出现构成着日益严峻的挑战。站在2026年，LLMs似乎正在实现学科的重新融合。随着AI4Science的发展，我对LLMs有朝一日能成为主动拓展知识岛的POLYMATH是乐观的。