Antiquitopia

To be "interdisciplinary" has been a catchword for well over a decade in the academic world; grants are based upon it, jobs increasingly rely upon it, and, who knows, perhaps the future of the university will be based upon it.  It can lead to provocative (yet unlikely and perhaps silly) proposals , but also genuine collaboration.  Sometimes "interdisciplinary" isn't very much so:  it is often the confluence of people in different departments on their own side of the humanities/sciences divide.  The question remains how sciences and humanities can learn from one another in a mutually beneficial dialogue?  E.O. Wilson suggests that we have a common basis in story --whether you are a novelist or a physicist, you are essentially telling a story.  You may use a different set of vocabulary, different degrees of metaphor (although Lakoff and Johnson might say that all our language is essentially metaphoric), but we want to tell a story.  The best scholars t...

When poets were scientists, when scientists were poets, oh what an age! A new book, reviewed in the NYTimes called the Age of Wonder discusses the age from the eighteenth to nineteenth centuries when divisions between science, poetry, etc., were not so demarcated, but united in common wonder and awe. July 9, 2009 BOOKS OF THE TIMES When Poets Were Scientists and Nature Their Mysterious Muse By JANET MASLIN THE AGE OF WONDER How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science By Richard Holmes Illustrated. 552 pages. Pantheon Books. $40. William Herschel, the German-born, star-gazing musician who effectively doubled the size of the solar system with a single discovery in 1781, was not regarded as a scientist. That word had not been coined during most of the era that will now be known, thanks to Richard Holmes’s amazingly ambitious, buoyant new fusion of history, art, science, philosophy and biography, as “The Age of Wonder.” And Mr. Holmes’s excitement at fusing lo...