Yi-Fu Tuan Dear Colleague

June 8, 2004

Dear Colleague,

Humanists and scientists, in their effort to understand reality, have much more in common than is commonly thought. Good humanist scholarship requires one to project oneself into another's world. What is it like to be a politician in eighteenth-century England? That's something Sir Lewis Namier wants to know. What is it like to be a mother on welfare in Milwaukee? A good sociologist not only wants to know how much time she spends in governmental waiting rooms, but her possible state of mind as she waits.

But isn't doing first-rate physical science different? I used to think it is until I read George Wald, a Nobel laureate in chemistry. He writes: "I tell my students to try to feel like a molecule. If they can reach the point of saying to themselves, when up against some problem of molecular behavior, ' What would I do if I were that molecule' -then things are going well" (J. C. Speakman, Molecules , 1966). And that reminds me of the story Norman Malcolm told about his Cambridge mentor, Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein, a philosopher and logician, complained that the science as taught in British schools was excessively abstract. In a typical geography or astronomy class, for example, the teacher is likely to tell students that the moon revolves around the earth and the earth revolves around the sun. He may even write down some equations to show the various forces involved. Students take notes, remember the facts, and that's about it. What they don't get is the feel of the system. They have no feel for physical reality, no idea what it is like to be the moon, the earth, and the sun. Well, what is it like? Wittgenstein addressed this question as he, Malcolm, and Malcolm's wife walked-down a narrow Cambridge Street. Wittgenstein hinted at an answer through the device of a game. He asked Malcolm's wife to continue her stately stroll as the sun. He asked Malcolm to be the earth; his task was to run around his wife. Characteristically, Wittgenstein assigned himself the most difficult role of moon. As moon he had to race madly in small tight circles around Malcolm as Malcolm raced somewhat less madly in larger circles around his wife. The good people of Cambridge, used to university eccentrics, barely looked up at this whirl of activity (Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir, 1958). The real point of the story, however, is that knowing the equations is not enough. The good scientists--the genuinely creative scientists--must know what they stand for in their bones. They must somehow be the moon, the earth, and the sun.

Well, we all know that novelists have a knack of putting themselves in other peoples' shoes. Poets, for their part, famously tell us what it is like to be a rose or, for that matter, a pig. But it surprises me still that scientists do the same thing, only more so, by which I mean their visceral imagination is stretched beyond the familiar-other human beings, other animals, or even other plants-to something as remote as a molecule and its field of forces. I suppose the conclusion must be that we think not only with our brain but with our entire self, that not only the brain has some affinity with the drama of the universe but that our body-bones, sinews, emotions, and all-have an affinity with it, and hence is a means to understanding it. The universe, after all, is not just the Newtonian order that the brain tells us, but also violence and chaos of the sort our passionate body knows in full measure.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu