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Academic discipline, that is!
I had a thought when I was looking over the Life Sciences/Physical Sciences/Medicine/Culture skills, and I wondered what the distribution of different scientific fields would be in the game. The skills chapter mentions a few, but they are by no means not comprehensive. So I wanted to throw this out to you guys:
Which fields of science match which skill?
Here's a few I didn't see listed
Psychology: Probably best to put this under Life Sciences, since a society with this much advanced tech would basically turn Psych into a variant of biology. But I could also see it going under Medicine if we're talking psychiatric care (or Physical Science, since psychiatry and pharmacology overlap).
Mathematics: Physical Sciences, mainly because physics appears to be put under this category. This includes the different subdivisions, such as calculus, statistics, trigonometry, geometry, etc.
Sociology/Anthropology: Culture. For the former, I think it fits better than psych for Culture, since it studies patterns in populations (and social psych and sociology as very heavily intertwined)
But here's more questions: where do you put knowledge of civic engineering? What about biomedical? How about public health? Now what about communications, or literature, or philosophy? Where do those fit in? I'm legitimately curious, because what with Starfinder being a futuristic game these are all things that could come up, and in my games, 100% will...
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Psychology is Culture + Sense Motive. The idea that somehow it eventually becomes purely biology based is pretty ridiculous when examined, speaking as a Psych student. It's about how to predict people as individuals, not in aggregate, and biology is pretty bad at that most of the time unless you're actively looking at a real time brain scan and have way more knowledge of how brains work than we do (which there's little evidence of in Starfinder).
Psychiatry would definitely add in Life Science and Medicine (often at the expense of Sense Motive).
Civic Engineering would likely be Physical Science, though Engineering also clearly plays a role.
Biomedical is kinda the definition of the intersection beytween Life Science and Medicine.
Literature is clearly Culture.
I honestly don't know on Communications. Probably Culture, I guess.