D

Monday was the first day of Dartmouth's spring term. So, as I often do at this time, I started teaching my course for non-science majors called "Understanding the Universe: From Atoms to the Big Bang".

This is what students like to call a "physics for poets" class - a class that explores the history of how humanity has faced some of the deepest questions we can ask about the material world and our place in it, without the math. It is a class that tries to capture the true spirit of the liberal-arts education, mixing the sciences and the humanities as different and complementary ways of knowing the world and why we matter. In fancier words, as an intellectual history of physics and astronomy (天文学), the class requires that scientific thinking be contextualized culturally, so that students can situate the ways in which some of the most revolutionary ideas in the past 2,000 years emerged when they did.

Scientists, by training, have little exposure to the humanities. Given that a major in the sciences requires a lot of technical work, we spend precious little time dealing with what happened culturally and historically around the science we are trying to understand. This, I believe, is the reason why so many scientists in the public media condemn (谴责) the humanities as useless. As a consequence, many scientific ideas are presented as having addressed some of the deepest questions we have been asking, when they haven't.

Humanities students, on the other hand, are typically those who avoid the sciences or, at least, math. Their training is also technical, involving lots of reading and critical writing. You can often tell, when you teach this kind of class, who the scientists and the humanists are. All you have to do is write an equation (方程) on the blackboard and look at the class. Humanists will quickly look bored. The scientists will become lively. As you read from Aristotle's Metaphysics, the opposite will happen. To bridge this gap is the challenge.

The classroom is the ideal place for this conversation between the sciences and the humanities to unfold. By exposing students to the two sides of the cultural divide, we stand a chance of creating something that will actually close the gap. Scientists should recognize that some research topics - AI, biotechnology, climate change, life extension, nature, and many others - need to be investigated together with humanists as a joint effort.

I finished the first class by reminding the students that not even the best teacher in the world can teach someone who doesn't want to learn. After all, as Tom Stoppard reminded us in his brilliant play Arcadia, it is wanting to know that makes us matter - scientists and humanists alike.