The author provides a tool for learning how subjects relate to each other, or "how things hang together in a totality". [x]
Knowledge appears to be increasingly compartmentalized, or so its prize-winning practitioners insist. In 1984, the author presciently points out that the difficulty and cost of information exchange is dropping: the world is "plural", a word the author very cleverly does not try to gloss.
Some of the more understandable definitions of scientific terms. For example, Maxwell's Demon is not just a mechanism which separates the fast molecules from the slow ones, creating hot regions which can drive engines, but..."Thus a theoretician accuses another of 'playing Maxewll's Demon' when suspecting him or her of falsely creating a system with negative entropy, an impossibility". Somehow that brought it home for me. I was always clinging to the hope of the Demon, and to Entropy as one more E in E=mc2, sort of.