As someone with a level of expertise in astrophysics (I am a doctoral candidate in cosmology) and experience working on the teaching team for an undergraduate Big History course, I am a wholehearted supporter of Big History’s approach. As a scholarly project, Big History has potential to bring together the sciences and the humanities in a way that few, if any, other disciplines can. As a pedagogical endeavor and the raw material for undergraduate and high-school curriculum, Big History can provide a unifying structure that helps students to contextualize their lives and their studies, understand how their world came to be the way it is today, and think on a variety of scales in time and space. Because Big History draws on so many sources in the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, it provides a combination of breadth and rigor that serves as a valuable antidote to the fragmentation of knowledge that characterizes most academic pursuits today. It challenges students and scholars alike to actively integrate different sources of knowledge and different disciplinary approaches. And it offers a fresh perspective on each of the disciplines from which it draws, revealing insights about those disciplines that are not detectable when they are viewed in isolation.
While specialization in the pursuit of knowledge undeniably has its place, a macroscopic and interdisciplinary view has its own merits, and Big History is a superb framework for synthesizing the contributions of diverse disciplines into a story to which people--from historians, to astrophysicists, to students, to the general public--can relate.