Issue 18  December 13th 2025

The theme of this issue is Surface Area.

Breakthroughs often come from unexpected collisions—between disciplines, between mental models, between people who do not normally share a room. In science, these collisions depend on something deceptively simple: surface area—the number of opportunities for ideas to come into contact with other ideas. The more surface area a system has, the more likely it is to generate combinations, insights, and new directions. The less it has, the more it drifts toward repetition, incrementalism, and siloed thinking.

Over time, the scientific ecosystem has been quietly shrinking its surface area. Ever-narrowing specialization, rigid disciplinary boundaries, incentives that reward depth over breadth, and administrative burdens that leave little room for exploration—all of these forces reduce the contact surface between fields and researchers. The system optimizes for clarity and control, but at the cost of connectivity.

This continues threads from past newsletters Layers, Currents, and Selectivity: altitude, incentives, and filters that shrink science’s contact surface. Together, they point to a system that increasingly keeps ideas apart.

The timing makes this especially consequential. Today’s frontier problems—climate resilience, biosecurity, advanced materials, AI-driven discovery—often sit at the intersections of disciplines. Progress depends on moving ideas across domains and building on adjacencies that no single field controls. A system with low surface area can only move linearly. A system with high surface area can move combinatorially.

Here are a few exemplars that incorporated surface area considerations into their design and operations. Each shows how structure—space, schedules, incentives, and norms—can widen the contact surface without sacrificing rigor:

• Bell Labs maximized surface area by co-locating theorists, engineers, and manufacturing, building long corridors and shared lounges to force daily collisions, running constant colloquia, and rotating people across teams.
• DARPA engineered surface area at the program level. It brings in rotating program managers from academia and industry, runs small, time-boxed efforts around sharply defined problems, convenes proposers’ days and PI meetings to deliberately mix disciplines, and empowers PMs to broker connections and reconfigure teams quickly.
• The Broad Institute is a modern model that merges biology, computation, and medicine through co-located labs, shared core facilities (e.g., sequencing, imaging, compute), joint appointments across MIT, Harvard, and affiliated hospitals, and problem-focused consortia that regularly convene cross-disciplinary teams.

Innovation has always depended on the contact between ideas as much as the ideas themselves. If we want more breakthroughs, we need more collisions—more pathways for people and concepts to find each other across boundaries.

As part of this effort to widen the contact surface in science, we’ll be hosting a Jeffersonian-style dinner in New York City on January 15th. If conversations about the architecture of science resonate with you—and you’d like to join a small group exploring these questions—reply to this newsletter. A few seats are still open. If you can’t make the dinner, join the conversation in the Reimagining Science Funding community!