Conceieved as a "New Athens," the Santa Fe Institute brings together a pantheon of brilliant minds to ask the big questions.

In this crowd, there is nothing unusual about such intellectual shape-shifting. There is nothing surprising about an economist versed in endocrinology. Or a chemist studying brain development. Or a theoretical physicist searching for the original mother tongue. This, after all, is the Santa Fe Institute, a private, nonprofit think tank world-renowned for its unique interdisciplinary approach. For more than 20 years, the center has brought together world-class researchers in physics, biology, economics, anthropology, linguistics, neuroscience, and other disciplines to storm the frontiers of knowledge. Even the arts and humanities are represented: novelist Cormac McCarthy and photographer Robert Buelteman are artists in residence, hobnobbing freely with the scientists.