Can First Principles Guide Interdisciplinary Innovation?

Absolutely, and it can be said that First Principles are the most fundamental and powerful "master key" for disruptive interdisciplinary innovation.

Let's not make it sound so mysterious; think of it as children playing with LEGO bricks.

Most people innovate by "assembling LEGOs according to blueprints." You have a blueprint for a sports car, I have one for an airplane. So-called interdisciplinary collaboration might just be me attaching airplane wings to your sports car to see if it can fly. This is called "analogical thinking," where we merely combine existing finished products within their established frameworks.

But First Principles are completely different. They involve directly dismantling all finished LEGO models (whether sports cars, airplanes, or castles), reducing them to their most basic bricks—2x2, 1x4, wheeled, transparent... Then, looking at this pile of basic parts, you ask yourself: "What unprecedented new thing can I build with these most fundamental elements?"

You see, when you break down a problem to its most basic "bricks," the boundaries between disciplines disappear.

The "bricks" of physics are energy, force, atoms; those of chemistry are molecules, the periodic table; computer science's "bricks" are 0s and 1s, logic gates; and design's "bricks" are color, shape, and user psychological needs.

A top interdisciplinary innovator doesn't have "physics knowledge" or "design knowledge" in their mind, but rather these most fundamental "bricks."

Take a classic example: Dyson's vacuum cleaner.

Before Dyson, everyone was thinking about how to improve the "dust bag" to make it filter better and less prone to clogging (this was thinking within the framework of the "vacuum cleaner" as a finished product).

But James Dyson applied First Principles. His fundamental question was: "Why do we use a dust bag?" The answer: to separate air and dust. So, for the action of "separating air and dust," besides "filtration," is there a more fundamental method?

He found inspiration from a completely unrelated field—an industrial sawmill. Factories there used a large device called an "industrial cyclone" which, through centrifugal force generated by high-speed rotation, spun wood chips out of the air.

This "centrifugal separation" is a more fundamental physical principle "brick" than "filtration."

What Dyson did was take this "physical brick" found in the "industrial manufacturing" domain and apply it to the "home appliance" domain, completely eliminating the dust bag and inventing the cyclonic vacuum cleaner. This was a brilliant First Principles-driven interdisciplinary innovation. He didn't engage in any collaboration between "home appliances" and "industry"; instead, he directly leveraged a fundamental principle of physics.

So, to summarize:

First Principles are like a hammer that helps you crack open the hard shells of different disciplines (their jargon, conventions, fixed mindsets), allowing you to see the hidden "fundamental bricks" common to all disciplines (e.g., physical laws, mathematical logic, human needs).

Once you hold these universal fundamental bricks in your hand, you are no longer just a "programmer" or "designer" or "engineer"; you become a true "creator." You can freely take two bricks from discipline A, three bricks from discipline B, and build an unprecedented C.

This is the essence of interdisciplinary innovation: not combining two existing houses, but using the most basic bricks and tiles to build an entirely new temple.