Marcelo Gleiser is a theoretical physicist and writer — and a professor of natural philosophy, physics and astronomy at Dartmouth College. He is the director of the Institute for Cross-Disciplinary Engagement at Dartmouth, co-founder of 13.7 and an active promoter of science to the general public. His latest book is The Simple Beauty of the Unexpected: A Natural Philosopher's Quest for Trout and the Meaning of Everything. You can keep up with Marcelo on Facebook and Twitter: @mgleiser
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 confronted 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, the humanities, and the social sciences as different and complementary ways of knowing the world and why we matter. In fancier words, as an intellectual history of physics and astronomy, 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.That said, it's interesting to see how students that have a background in the sciences — and those who don't — look at the course. This is something that speaks to our educational system at large.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. We don't learn much about Galileo and his bouts with the Roman Inquisition, or about Newton's religious motivation for his work or his research in alchemy, or Kepler's Pythagorean mysticism, or Darwin's struggles with his wife's (and his own) faith, or Einstein's work as a pacifist. In the classroom, at least, we learn about their technical ideas, but not about who they were or why they were thinking what they were at the time.This, I believe, is the reason why so many scientists (with, of course, brave exceptions), many of them in the public media, condemn the humanities as useless — or seem not to understand why we should bother with them at all. As a consequence, many scientific ideas are presented as having conquered some of the deepest questions we have been asking for millennia, when they haven't. Point in case, the origin of the universe, something we can't truly address within the scientific framework as we know it, is often presented as solved and understood. God isn't needed. Case closed. Boom.Humanities students, on the other hand, are (with, of course, brave exceptions) typically those who eschew 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 on the blackboard and look at the class. Humanists' eyes will quickly glaze over. The scientists will perk up. As you read from Aristotle's Metaphysics, the opposite will happen. To bridge this gap is the challenge.This split, of course, is not new. In 1959, the British physicist and novelist C.P. Snow, in his Rede Lecture at Cambridge University, called our attention to the Two Cultures divide — the growing gap between the sciences and the humanities that, he believed, threatened the health of academia: