What is a Physicist Doing in the Jungle? Biomimetics of the Rainforest

This paper summarizes a TEDx Talk that the European physics professor Ille C. Gebeshuber, who has been living in South East Asia for nearly five years now, gave to a live audience of 800 in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in July 2012. A similar talk is also given as an invited lecture at the 4thInternational Conference of Bionic Engineering in China in August 2013. The talk highlights the importance of news ways of doing science and of doing engineering that are needed to successfully address the major challenges humankind is currently facing, and how a generalistic approach synergistically combining Eastern and Western thinking might help in this respect. Biomimetics is stressed as an integrated, generalist way of learning from living nature, and as best practice example for developing new approaches that are based on understanding rather than learning by heart, with memory, reason and imagination as pillars, bridging fields of specialization and of education and thereby blending the knowledge of single isolated scientists and specialist scientist networks to a wisdom of the whole, powerful enough to help us successfully address our major problems.