alt Hacker NewsThe strength of analogy is one of the more powerful tools humans have. You take findings/experience from a totally different field and use it to escape the local maxima that other field is caught in.
It's a relatively common theme in sciences that someone comes out of nowhere and solves a long standing problem in a field because they don't have the specialized set of biases that keeps everyone else trapped.
IMHO, it's MUCH more common in sciences though, that someone that is expert-level in one field comes into another and thinks they CAN solve a long standing problem in that field quite easily, and then repeatedly falls into all the pitfalls / traps that others in that field learned long ago to avoid (aka Dunning-Kruger). You know, "chemistry is just applied physics", "biology is applied chemistry", etc.. Sure, it's true in one sense, but... No one calculates the wave function of an elephant, for example.
One of the benefits of generalism / learning multiple fields (IMHO, again) is that you realizes that special abilities / skills don't necessarily translate well from one field to another. For example, learning to play the violin is very different from, say, playing billiards, yet becoming good at either one involves learning subtle manipulations of basically similarly-shaped pieces of wood. By involvement in multiple fields, you learn to be careful NOT to bring your "everything is a nail" mentality with you from one field to the next.