So I'm totally on board with everyone knowing something about the liberal arts and trying to expand your world outside your traditional scope.
But I think "understanding" can mean just making connections within a single tech field, even without involving liberal arts. For example, a grade school math problem: "Assume the earth is a perfect sphere with radius 6378 km, and you have a piece of string just long enough to reach all the way around the earth's equator at the earth's surface. How much longer would your string have to be to make a perfect circle exactly one meter above the earth's equator at every point?"
The answer is 2(pi) meters. That's true for any spherical planet of any size -- that's what it means for the derivative of 2(pi)(r) with respect to r to be 2(pi). That is sometimes not the first thing people think of though, because of the grade-school context they associate with this problem....
But I think "understanding" can mean just making connections within a single tech field, even without involving liberal arts. For example, a grade school math problem: "Assume the earth is a perfect sphere with radius 6378 km, and you have a piece of string just long enough to reach all the way around the earth's equator at the earth's surface. How much longer would your string have to be to make a perfect circle exactly one meter above the earth's equator at every point?"
The answer is 2(pi) meters. That's true for any spherical planet of any size -- that's what it means for the derivative of 2(pi)(r) with respect to r to be 2(pi). That is sometimes not the first thing people think of though, because of the grade-school context they associate with this problem....