On Not Being “Smack in the Center of Culture”

 

In a 2014 On Being interview with physicist Brian Greene, Krista Tippett elicited this response from the scientist about the cultural divide:

. . . We have these arbitrary distinctions and cordoning off of science in particular. It typically sits at the outskirts of culture, and we sort of wheel it in whenever we have a problem. We wheel it in when we love the technological advances that it gives rise to. But still science is generally pushed off to the side relative to those things that really matter to a full life.

And I think that is tragic, because science deserves to be right smack in the center of culture, because it is our quest to understand who we are and how we fit into the big picture. Just as great poetry is, just as great literature is. So it’s not this separate activity. It’s all part of the human swirl to make sense of a fundamentally senseless position that we find ourselves in. Right? We’re thrust into this world on this rock that’s orbiting a nondescript star on the outskirts of an ordinary galaxy.