About Leo I'm not a scientist, but I play one on TV. I'm currently a student. My interests are in human history, and in particular trying to make the field of human history more of a science. Scientific history or historical science might sound like an oxy-moron, but for a long time history was regarded as just that. You might say that history is about the particular while science is about the general; that history is about contingency and context, while science is about universal laws. Fair enough. But history at all levels certainly emerges from the same natural laws as anything else. Evolution is primarily a historical process, and how would one study cosmology without allowing for history? My aim is to reconnect human history to natural history and reconnect social science to natural science in a way that brings light to a more comprehensive, holistic, and cohesive view of human history. There are already both historians and scientists who have worked toward this very end, including David Christian (the leading proponent of Big History, which seeks to place human history within the proper context of natural history) and Jared Diamond (author of the books Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse). I'm particularly intrigued by the idea of reinterpreting human history in terms of complex system and nonlinearities. Peter Turchin and others have pioneered a theory called Cliodynamics, which is one very good example of how this kind of intellectual synthesis might be useful. If one accepts that climate, geopolitics, economics, and society are all receptive to the complex systems approach (and I would say they are), then why not apply this paradigm historically to get a better understanding of our collective past? History is, after all, nothing more than a network of inter-connected events in space and time. Natural laws aren't much good if we cannot understand the consequences of those laws at the social level and the unfolding of those consequences through time. And, if the study of the history of life, or the history of the planet, or the history of the climate, or any other field that caries the prefix "paleo", why not humanity? There is really no reason, therefore, why a scientific approach to history should not be feasible, at least in principle. That may be my angle, but I'm also very interested in complex systems, nonlinear dynamics, network theory and related fields for their own sake. I'm also interested in many other fields and areas of study, including cosmology, climatology, computer science, the philosophy and history of science (not surprisingly), and virtually any other. I'm not a specialist at heart. I've always been the archetypal jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none. I prefer to call myself multifaceted, but it's possible to argue that I'm just unfocused and confused. Whatever the case, I may not carry any iron-clad expertise in any one field, but no matter the topic it's unlikely I wont know something about it and it's likely that I'll have something useful to say or contribute so long as it's something that interests me. Primarily, I'm here to learn, but I also hope, on occasion, to share.

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