Teaching And Learning At The Boundaries Of Two Cultures

This is what students like to call a 'physics for poets' class - a class that explores the history of how humanity has confronted some of the deepest questions we can ask about the material world and our place in it, without the math...as an intellectual history of physics and astronomy, the class requires that scientific thinking be contextualized culturally, so that students can situate the ways in which some of the most revolutionary ideas in the past 2,000 years emerged when they did.

Scientists, by training, have little exposure to the humanities. Given that a major in the sciences requires a lot of technical work, we spend precious little time dealing with what happened culturally and historically around the science we are trying to understand.

Read at NPR.org