Wiio's law states that "Communication usually fails, except by accident". To understand what words mean, it's useful to look at their history. Communication means "to make common". Accident comes from ad- "to" and cadere "fall". Taking this humorous saying seriously for a minute, where do we have to fall to make something common? Imagine a cross-section of a landscape, with a number of wells of various depth and breath. A well represents a field, like physics, cooking, or writing. The depth is how specialized the field is. The breadth is how many people are familiar with it. For example, English is quite complex but it's common to a lot of people, so that's a wide but deep well. Obscure trivia is shallow and not very wide. Something like Quantum Field Theory is very deep and not wide at all. As we discover more things, especially in science, wells merge or disappear. Is this an accurate depiction of human knowledge? Probably not, but it gives you a way to communicate complex ideas: (a) understand that you are in a well and (b) make it easy for people to fall into that well. (191 words)
