While browsing the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences last month, I noticed a commentary that bears the intriguing title “The science in social science.” Although the author, anthropologist Russell Bernard of the University of Florida, does indeed discuss the science behind economics, psychology, and other disciplines, the commentary’s main target was the public’s low appreciation of the benefits of social sciences. As Bernard puts it in his abstract:
A recent poll showed that most people think of science as technology and engineering—life-saving drugs, computers, space exploration, and so on. This was, in fact, the promise of the founders of modern science in the 17th century. It is less commonly understood that social and behavioral sciences have also produced technologies and engineering that dominate our everyday lives. These include polling, marketing, management, insurance, and public health programs.
At first, Bernard’s defensive tone led me to believe he had succumbed to a condition known as physics envy, the feeling of inferiority among some social scientists that their disciplines lack the mathematical and empirical rigor of physics. Lest you think that physics envy is an imagined malady, consider the opinion piece by two political scientists, Kevin Clarke and David Primo of the University of Rochester, that appeared last March in the New York Times. It’s entitled “Overcoming ‘physics envy.’”
But rather than argue, as Clarke and Primo do, that social scientists shouldn’t strive to frame their ideas as testable theories, Bernard convincingly recounts how the fruits of the social sciences pervade and enrich our daily lives.
Sicinius Velutus and Henry V
Although I doubt physicists will contract anything that might be called social sciences envy, there is evidence here and there that physicists and their professional relatives increasingly recognize the benefits of greater exposure to the arts and humanities.
Writing for the Sacramento Bee, Marisa Agha reported recently that a small and growing number of Caltech undergraduates are choosing majors like English and history and coupling them with a science or math major. At the university where I did my bachelor’s degree, Imperial College London, the undergraduate curriculum features an expanded range of optional classes in the humanities, including the delightfully titled Global History of Twentieth Century Things.
The benefits of studying humanities extend beyond the traditional goal of creating well-rounded graduates through a balanced curriculum. If you’ve cavorted about a stage in Elizabethan dress reciting Shakespeare, then giving a talk at a meeting of the American Physical Society will be as easy as setting dogs on sheep (Sicinius Velutus in Coriolanus). If you’ve argued in ten pages for—or against—the case that the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s inherent instability was the principal cause of World War I, then writing a three-page paper in Applied Physics Letters will be as easy as conquering France or speaking French (if you’re Henry V in Henry V, that is).
The civil flag of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The empire’s instability was a principal cause of World War I—or not.
When scientists study humanities, society wins. Dealing with climate change, taming terrorism, and ending hunger are big, important problems whose ultimate solutions are unlikely to be wholly technical. Knowledge of human behavior and history, and the ability to understand and communicate with people, will be needed too.
Although Steve Jobs was talking about a tablet computer, the iPad2, when he made the following remarks, their sentiment is profound and apt for 21st-century scientists and engineers:
Technology alone is not enough . . . It’s technology married with the liberal arts, married with the humanities, that yields us the results that make our hearts sing.
Amen.
I can’t begin to top the pithy commenter who said only “Amen.”
But in my decades of serving science by serving scientists as a writer and editor whose university education was in the field of English, I’ve learned to tell a story about research engineers whenever this humanities subject comes up in the technorealm.
Back in the 90s, NASA commissioned a book made of historical research papers for each of the various Collier Trophies won by the old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics and by NASA, the agency that in 1958 replaced the NACA. Because they had no Ph.D. historian for the chapter on the postwar advent of transonic wind tunnels, and because they knew that I knew just enough about that topic to be dangerous, the NASA history office gave the transonic assignment to me.
Because the physics of fluid flows differs enormously between the subsonic and the supersonic, and because things get weird at the transonic transition, research engineers drew on decades of wind tunnel experience to solve the problem. (The solution was a partially physics-derived and partially experience-derived slotting of the “test section” or “throat” where testing takes place in a tunnel.) This meant that I needed to look back at decades’ worth of primary-source documentation.
Two of the principals in those decades of aeronautical engineering research at the NACA were Dick Lindsey and John Stack. I found Lindsey’s manuscripts to be good examples of the clunky, dense writing that engineers are sometimes alleged to perpetrate. But Stack had had an early and first-class prep school education in New England, I believe with substantial, high-quality instruction in the humanities, likely with lots of writing practice. His manuscripts are beautifully written. They remind me of some of the best writing by famous physicists whose compositions can draw in even nonscientists, thanks to their clarity and grace.
No one but me, a historian or two, and a few aeronautical research old-timers remembers Lindsey’s name. Stack, however, shared in not one but two Collier Trophies. I suspect most strongly that the humanities component in Stack’s education contributed enormously to his overall success as an aeronautical researcher and research leader.
One other thing: I also believe that if you compare Nature and Science for literary merit and for enhancement of the science forum by incorporation of humanities perspectives, Nature wins. I’ve always thought that this must stem from a superior well-roundedness of researchers’ educations in the UK, where Nature originates.
Yes, everything above is anecdotal, unquantified, opinionated, and lacking in extensive empirical backing. I told you I was an English major!
Thanks for the interesting comment, Steve.
I agree with you about Nature being a better read than Science, but I doubt that’s because of the British education system. Undergraduate degrees in England and Wales* are typically all major and (almost no) minor—at least they were when I was a student in the 1980s.
Rather, I suspect that literary flair is more valued and encouraged in British print media than in the US. Why that might be the case, I’m not sure. The competitive nature of Britain’s media market might be responsible or maybe it’s cultural thing.
There is, however, a flip side to literary journalism. Some British commentators evidently believe they can win arguments merely through dazzling prose. They can’t. Facts matter too!
*I’m less familiar with Scotland’s education system, which is different from that of England and Wales.
I hear you. But as with the story of John Stack, I’m not talking about university education. I’m talking about education below the university level. In fact, I’ll even note that when I taught freshman composition and sophomore literature decades ago, I came to believe that writers get made or lost earlier in their schooling. By the time of college, it’s mostly too late. When I was a kid, my family belonged for two years to a mostly English congregation in an English church in a Paris suburb. That’s where my view that the English are more literary and literate than Americans began. So I’m saying it’s not a matter of university education; it’s deeper. It’s a matter of cultural predisposition and practice — much as you say, maybe, in one of your paragraphs just above. And I think, as I gather that you do too, that this makes Nature a richer and more valuable forum for science than Science. Yes, facts matter — as Mr. Gradgrind reminded us, right? But context and perspective, and humanity, frame and give meaning to facts. And though it’s true that scientists generally do a particularly good job of separating rhetorical flourishes from the logic of an argument — or the lack of logic — the best prose isn’t just dazzling anyway. It’s transformative, if you ask me.
Thank you, Charles Day, for your January 9, 2013 blog “Humanities envy” and for its apparent overall theme of a human being being more productive and even more engaging when engaged in the humanities as well as the sciences. This after all is one of the points in the idea of having a liberal arts education. After reading your blog plus your later one of “Mind-reading computers” of January 25, I took a step back while taking an experimental cue from you and so on Infospace searched on “philosophy of the human person” and got many hits on this topic from the humanities in which truth can be determined from philosophical arguments whose right reasoning is based on propositions that lead to true conclusions. I clicked on just one link that came up from my search, bringing up a synopsis of a course with that title as given by Prof. John D. Kronen at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, MN (whom I had never before heard of). In his first paragraph “What is this course about?” is phrased the question, “doesn’t the human person have a soul, which transcends the physical, and hence isn’t the person’s nature such that it cannot be studied by science alone? It is precisely because this question can at least be asked that there is a proper philosophical study of the human person.” Indeed, it is my view that the ultimate horizon for our lives as human persons extends beyond that of the material aspects of the world we live in because there is also a spiritual dimension that must be taken into account when considering “what the human person essentially is” (Kronen’s words quoted). This reality is expressed experientially, in fact, in students’ and scientists’ perennial interests in many modes of human activity, such as not only in the physical and social sciences that both you and Prof. Kronen mention or allude to, viz., biology, psychology, or physics, but also in the creative arts, such as visual, tactile, and literary. In my own life (I’m now 70), I not only earned a Ph.D. in physics and then used that to launch a career in scientific research with which I stayed through retirement, but also wrote poetry, improvised classical music on the piano, and even painted abstract oils and acrylics in an outsider style. Certainly, science and art have not bifurcated my life but have helped to integrate it into a whole.