To know the society better
The knowledge is nearly blank at the beginning of the human history. Later on, we learn from experiences, and pass our lessons to the next generation with books and paintings.
When the giants appear, such as Newton and Euler, they push our knowledge boundaries greatly. And now, we see all kinds of subjects, research fields. More than that, as time goes by, more and more subjects crossed and bring more and more newborn fields to us.
One thing for sure is that the development progress of fields are different, some are so advanced and stable that it is difficult to see a breakthrough in hundreds of years, such as math and physics; some are recently proposed and are more like lies, such as meta-universe, strong artificial intelligence.
In a word, the deeper we dive, the narrower road we walk.