The principle is based on unity of knowledge; measuring the same result by several different methods should lead to the same answer.
For example, it should not matter whether one measures distances within the Giza pyramid complex by laser rangefinding, by satellite imaging, or with a metre-stick – in all three cases, the answer should be approximately the same.
This is how scientific theories reach high confidence—over time, they build up a large degree of evidence which converges on the same conclusion.
For example, in the 19th century, the Sun appeared to be no more than 20 million years old, but the Earth appeared to be no less than 300 million years (resolved by the discovery of nuclear fusion and radioactivity, and the theory of quantum mechanics);[4] or current attempts to resolve theoretical differences between quantum mechanics and general relativity.
[6] In a similar way, evidence about the history of the universe is drawn from astronomy, astrophysics, planetary geology, and physics.
Atomic physics underlies the workings of chemistry, which studies emergent properties that in turn are the basis of biology.
Sociology, economics, and anthropology are each, in turn, studies of properties emergent from the interaction of countless individual humans.
[1] Consilience has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos, inherently comprehensible by logical process, a vision at odds with mystical views in many cultures that surrounded the Hellenes.
"[11]"Proof is derived through a convergence of evidence from numerous lines of inquiry--multiple, independent inductions, all of which point to an unmistakable conclusion.
"[6]Although the concept of consilience in Whewell's sense was widely discussed by philosophers of science, the term was unfamiliar to the broader public until the end of the 20th century, when it was revived in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, a 1998 book by the author and biologist E. O. Wilson, as an attempt to bridge the cultural gap between the sciences and the humanities that was the subject of C. P. Snow's The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959).
[1] Wilson believed that "the humanities, ranging from philosophy and history to moral reasoning, comparative religion, and interpretation of the arts, will draw closer to the sciences and partly fuse with them" with the result that science and the scientific method, from within this fusion, would not only explain the physical phenomenon but also provide moral guidance and be the ultimate source of all truths.
[12] Wilson held that with the rise of the modern sciences, the sense of unity gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries.
He asserted that the sciences, humanities, and arts have a common goal: to give a purpose to understand the details, to lend to all inquirers "a conviction, far deeper than a mere working proposition, that the world is orderly and can be explained by a small number of natural laws."
Universology was first promoted for the study of the interconnecting principles and truths of all domains of knowledge by Stephen Pearl Andrews, a 19th-century utopian futurist and anarchist.