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| Photo: Honi Soit |
The divide between USyd arts and STEM students is both
literal and metaphorical. Engo grill and PNR Hub, the cornerstones of
the engineering faculty, lie far away from the light-filled, wooden
interiors of Courtyard. The metaphorical divide, however, manifests
itself as a subtle, simmering contempt, grounded in stereotypes. Science
and engineering students bemoan the relative freedom and relaxation of
arts students while dragging their feet to 20+ contact hours a week.
Arts students bemoan the starting salaries of chemical engineers.
But this divide is a superficial one. Arts and sciences are just two fields of study, each hoping
to accomplish the same simple thing with differing methodologies: to
understand the mechanisms of the world. Arts and the humanities do this
by interrogating culture, using language. Science does this by modelling
the world, using mathematics. Jupiter, then, is a gaseous giant and
also a mythological giant. Metaphysics and physics parallel each other
in thought, if not in practice. And both reveal facets of the same
phenomena.
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| Photo: Richard P. Feynman |
Richard Feynman, one of the most famous theoretical
physicists of the 20th century, once said that “if we look in a glass of
wine closely enough we see the entire universe”. He describes the
physics it revealed—the fluid mechanics of the liquid, the reflections
in the wine. It revealed geology, for glass is from the earth, and its
materials can be traced back to their formations in the cores of stars.
It revealed chemistry in the fermentation of the wine. Hence all there
is to know about the universe is in this humble glass.
It is easy to see STEM, with its mathematical symbolism
and inscrutable proofs as cold, technical, and removed from the
everyday. But to view it in this way is to ignore the romance of the
extra dimension it adds to the everyday, to glasses of wine, to arts and
the humanities.
Music, for example, is a human creation that relies heavily on emotion, and subjective preferences concerning sonic aesthetics. And yet underlying music is physics and mathematics...
Science and mathematics reveal a world that is weird, uncertain, and inextricably tied to the ways in which we live and experience our environment. Learning science does not remove one from the world—it adds to one’s understanding of it. Any perceived coldness or technicality results from forgetting to augment our study of science with the arts, with humanities, with philosophy and politics, literature and language, and music.
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Source: Honi Soit
