While watching the Trinity Test, the first ever time a nuclear weapon was exploded on the face of the earth, atomic scientist Robert Oppenheimer famously quoted the Bhagavad-Gita, saying, "I am become death, the destroyer of worlds."
If the Hopkins education is any indication, it's hard to imagine the scientists of the future being so well versed in religion or philosophy to think of this. And if that's the case, I am afraid we may have a lot more to lose than just cool quotations.
It's common to say that the sciences and humanities are both, in different ways, attempts by man to understand the world around him. Therefore, it should hardly be surprising that so many great thinkers have applied knowledge from one area to the benefit of the other. Invention does not occur in isolation, and literature and philosophy have often proved to be fertile sources of ideas for science.
Consider the nuclear bomb. The first person to conceptualize the use of nuclear energy as a weapon was futurist H.G. Wells in his book A World Set Free. Wells was dead wrong about how these weapons would work, but his writing caught the eye of theoretical physicist Leo Szilard. Even as the great Ernest Rutherford was publicly proclaiming the impossibility of harnessing nuclear energy, Szilard was thinking about Wells. In a private letter, he wrote, "I have reason to believe that in so far as the industrial applications of the present discoveries in physics are concerned, the forecast of the writers may prove to be more accurate than the forecast of the scientists." Sure enough, Szilard went on to patent the idea of a nuclear chain reaction and then develop the reactor with Enrico Fermi. Had it not been for Szilard's persistence against some parts of the scientific establishment, there is not telling whether the Allies would have beaten the Nazis to the bomb, and, as the saying goes, we might all be speaking German today.
As I said, science does not exist in a bubble. These days, biology -- evolution in particular -- is increasingly coming under attack. Don't get me wrong, the science behind evolution is bulletproof, but that makes it all the more frightening when surveys show half of all Americans doubt it.
Clearly, we have a problem here. The lack of understanding between science and other areas of society seems to be growing every day, and scientists in the days ahead are going to have to learn how to communicate more effectively and make their knowledge more available to the public. These are exactly the sorts of skills a strong background in the humanities teaches. If scientists don't do this, the public funding that drives research forward may begin to dry up.
Of course, this last point cuts both ways. Humanities and social sciences majors have to start getting serious about their hard sciences. Not surprisingly, it can make our work a whole lot better too. David Auburn's Proof and Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, two of the best plays of the last decade, are both centered on science and mathematics. Also, Thomas Pynchon, perhaps the most influential American author of the last half century, has used his two years of undergraduate engineering experience at Cornell to profound effect in his literary output. Science was also vitally important to one of Pynchon's biggest influences, historian Henry Adams. Adams found the discovery of radium and the scientific revolution of the late 19th and early 20th centuries to be the most important change in human understanding since Rome adopted Christianity. In all these works, the story of invention and scientific discovery is the story of our own lives.
By now you may be asking, what is the point in all this? Simple: if the University neglects the humanities, it hurts the sciences as well. Scientists must be able to explain their ideas to the public at large and should also be cognizant of the political and social climate in which their work exists. And when students look for insubstantial ways to fill our distributions (I am as guilty of this as anyone), we aren't doing ourselves any favors either.
I'm not arguing for a classical liberal arts education; no, it's precisely at a research institution like Hopkins where breadth is so important. When the idea is to contribute to human knowledge, generate new work and examine existing problems in new ways, novel ways of thinking are essential. People, even entire disciplines, can easily get stuck in a rut. Often it takes an idea from the most random or remote corner to get things moving again. There's no such thing as useless knowledge, only uncreative minds.
Perhaps then, of all the things the sciences and humanities have in common, the most important is that they both still have a lot to learn from each other.
Vijay Phulwani is a junior political science and classics major from Johnstown, Pa.
