Crossing Intellectual Boundaries, Summer 2004

Carol T. Christ, Smith Alumnae Quarterly, Summer 2004

We debated the nature of time and our conception of human nature. We wondered about chaos and order, and we tried to understand what drives human beings to undertake dangerous expeditions to map unknown worlds. We asked questions that bridge the worlds of science and fiction. Can we make a time machine? Can we accelerate evolution to diminish man's violent instincts? Should we seek to do any of these things?

This semester professor Marjorie Senechal and I co-taught a seminar called "Science and Literature." Marjorie is a mathematician and a scholar of the history of science; I, as you know, am a literary critic, whose specialty is Victorian England. We both have long felt that our students and colleagues have too few opportunities for conversation across what English scientist and novelist C. P. Snow has called the two cultures—the sciences and the humanities. Both have become specialized worlds within the academy, with the result that too many humanists are ignorant of important concepts in the sciences, and scientists lack the perspectives of the humanities on their work.

We organized the course around four scientific topics: voyages of exploration, the nature of time, the nature of pattern, and the nature of human nature. Our readings for each topic included a nineteenth-century novel, a twentieth-century work of imaginative fiction, and a twentieth-century nonfiction book about some aspect of the science involved. Some of my favorites were Andrea Barrett's wonderful set of linked short stories about nineteenth-century scientists, Servants of the Map; Alan Lightman's extraordinary set of fables about the nature of time, Einstein's Dreams; James Gleick'sChaos, about chaos theory; Steven Pinker's The Blank Slate; H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau; and Octavia Butler's science fiction fantasy, Dawn.

To our great pleasure, the students in the class came from a variety of majors and brought a rich range of perspectives to our discussions because they came with different understandings and experiences, much as Marjorie and I approached the books we read with different questions and perceptions. The class stretched us all.

The most surprising thing I learned is the extent to which the worlds of science and fiction are intertwined. I had assumed that fiction about science was essentially a derivative genre, secondary to the science it used to shape its fantasies. I've discovered what science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson recently called a "feedback loop" between science and science fiction. In an essay on Mars in The New York Times, he wrote,"Science fiction writers seize on new scientific findings and immediately leap to conclusions, in the form of stories. Then these stories dive into young minds and percolate there, shaping future scientists and giving them dreams, visions, plans." In one of his essays we read for the class, physicist and educator Freeman Dyson has written about the way H. G. Wells' The First Men in the Moon influenced his scientific exploration of space travel.

We spent a great deal of time in class examining metaphors. Even scientific theories sometimes use metaphors—the butterfly effect, black holes, blank slates. Nonfiction writers explaining science to nonspecialist readers lavish their prose with images. Any literary scholar will tell you that images are slippery, multifaceted in their implications. Secondary meanings and associations create a kind of undertow, enriching and complicating a literary text but sometimes confusing a scientific one. Is chaos theory really chaotic?

Several of the authors we read—Andrea Barrett, Alan Lightman, Octavia Butler, and Steven Pinker—accepted our invitation to join us for class and to give a public talk. Each emphasized the common ground between science and literature. Lightman, who came to fiction from a career as a research physicist, put the relationship in particularly interesting terms. People mistakenly assume, he said, that novelists make up everything and physicists make up nothing. Both, however, depend upon the free invention of the mind—the imagination, but the imagination in a straitjacket. The real world constrains the novelist, and the internal logic of a problem constrains the scientist.

Smith students graduating today enter a world profoundly dependent on science and technology. They must have the capacity to make meaningful connections across intellectual boundaries. Seminars like "Science and Literature" are one approach; others include the growing number of courses infused with aspects of quantitative literacy, as well as courses in science and engineering designed expressly for nonmajors. At Smith, the conversation between the sciences and the humanities is deepening. We are all the richer for it.