“Jabberwocky,” altering it thusly: “Eight slithy toves gyre and
Scientists and Engineers Need
Literature by Troy Camplin
Shortly after clocks were introduced to Japan in the
sixteenth century, Japanese inventors used the principles
underlying the clock’s movements to create robots. True, those
robots were merely mechanical dolls, but they could often do
quite intricate tasks, like serving tea and writing Japanese
characters. This idea that mechanical objects could—and
should—be made animate and even human, is a deep part of
Japanese culture. That helps to explain why the Japanese
remain at the forefront of robotic technology.
You could make the argument that if one were
interested in becoming a robotics engineer, an excellent way of
doing so would be to become more Japanese. But how does
one become more Japanese? How do we get into the mindset
of a Japanese person, whose world-view is formed as much by
Buddhism and Shintoism as the Western mind is formed by
ancient Greek philosophy and Christianity?
The answer is: fiction.
When we read a work of fiction, we come to empathize
with the characters. We come to know them from the inside.
Literature is how we download another’s mind into our own.
Even though Japanese novelists Kenzaburo Oe and Kawabata
do not themselves write about robots, having engineering
students read their works puts them into the minds of people
who live in a culture of which robots are a natural outgrowth.
Despite such benefits, literature is one of those
courses that students in pretty much every other major consider
to be a pointless requirement. Why should a physics major or an
engineering major care about literature? Or a chemistry or
biology or psychology or economics or sociology major?
Clearly the psychology major should know some
biology and sociology. And in the case of Hayek’s theory of
spontaneous orders, anyone studying networks, including
sociology, psychology, brain science, and biology, should
definitely learn some economics. But where does literature fit
into this? Wouldn’t it be better if people simple focused more on
their narrow fields to learn about those fields more thoroughly?
In other words, is literature mere entertainment for
those wealthy enough to get a liberal arts education? Or might
there be something more to it?
First, as Mark Turner argues in The Literary Mind, we
think with stories. Literary works are the most refined and
complex versions of our natural way of thinking. That being the
case, if you want to sharpen your thinking and make it more
complex, then read more literature.
Thomas Carlyle defined literature as “the Thought of
thinking Souls”—meaning if you want to think best and most
beautifully, you simply must read literature. If we want our
scientists and engineers and inventors to be good thinkers, we
should encourage them to read literature.
Second, literature, like other arts, helps stimulate
creativity. There is creative crossover, and this crossover helps
people to see patterns and connections in other fields. Bursts of
creativity are apt to occur when one way of thinking comes into
contact with another.
Specialists in a field who only read and discuss the
work of others in that field can settle into uncreative groupthink.
Literature, with its complexities and narrative structures and
alternative meanings, can break groupthink, creating new
insights and possibilities. This is why we find the most creative
scientists to be avid lovers of the arts, including literature.
When Max Planck received the Nobel Prize for
physics, he commented that, “I am vividly reminded of Goethe’s
saying that men will always be making mistakes as long as they
are striving after something.” It was a giant of literature, not a
physicist, who came to mind for Planck. Noted chaos theorist
Mitchell Feigenbaum too found inspiration in Goethe—notably,
his Faust, in which Goethe develops the theme of the
interrelatedness of order and chaos. And when British physicist
Sir Authrur Eddington tried to explain how electrons actually
behave in an atom, he went with Lewis Carroll’s poem
gimble in the oxygen wabe.”
Literature helped guide these scientists to their
scientific insights—insights that challenged the predominant
ways of thinking. And when we look at the lives of our most
creative scientists, we discover that they all counted literature as
being central to their creativity. Creativity develops out of
expanding our horizons, not from narrowing them.
Literature is also filled with a number of patterns. There
are complex patterns of meaningful word distribution in novels,
rhythmic and often rhyming patterns in formalist poetry, patterns
of speech and action in plays. Some of these patterns are
regular, others are irregular, and many are fractal (exhibiting
both regularity and irregularity simultaneously). Literature can
thus help us to see patterns more clearly, and to see more
complex patterns. This allows us to see connections and to
notice when something is breaking a pattern. Both are vital to
scientific discovery.
Literature is filled with the expected (patterns) and the
unexpected (pattern breaks). It is sometimes filled with strange
happenings—Kafka’s The Metamorphosis being an obvious
example—that challenge the way you view the world. Kafka
certainly presents us with a strange world and forces us to
reconsider the way things are. We are faced with strange
possibilities—things as strange as quantum physics and the
strange attractors of chaos theory. Works like The
Metamorphosis help develop a mind that’s open to
counterintuitive possibilities.
And as we discussed above, literature allows you to
inhabit the life and world of different people. Thus, literature
develops our empathy. Men can experience what it’s like to be
a woman; women can experience what it’s like to be a man. I’ve
experienced being an African-American woman through Toni
Morrison and Alice Walker, being an African-American man
through Langston Hughes, being an African tribal priest through
Chinua Achebe, being a Colombian Hispanic through Gabriel
García Márquez, being a Czech Jew through Kafka, being
ancient Greek through Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, and
Aeschylus, and being a modern Greek through Kazantzakis, just
to name a few.
I have inhabited those lives in the only ways actually
possible—literature—and that has made me more open,
cosmopolitan, and creative. There is little doubt in my mind that
literature has allowed me to see the world as deeply complex,
which has in turn affected the way I have done my own social
science work, seeing the world as I do from a complexity
perspective.
New ways of thinking do not occur just among
disciplines, but among cultures as well. These cultural
differences have resulted in geographically distinct scientific
developments. It is not a coincidence that so many of the
revolutionary physicists of the early part of the 20th century were
Germanic or that early Darwinism was an English phenomenon.
And we have already seen that robotic innovation is a mostly
Japanese phenomenon.
Cultural elements contributed to those patterns,
because culture affects the way we think and view the world. It
affects the kinds of questions we ask, and the kinds of answers
we see. As we come to understand different cultures better, we
will come to think in more creative ways, which can benefit those
in math, technology, engineering, and the sciences.
STEM students—those in science, technology,
engineering, and math—need literature because it helps to
sharpen and complexify our thinking. They will have seen a
more complex world, from which they will then ask new
questions and find better solutions. And as complexity science
comes to dominate more and more, STEM students are going
to need more complex habits of thought. Those who want to be
most innovative in their fields will not ignore literature.
Reference: Camplin, T. (2013). Scientists and Engineers Need
Literature. The James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal.
From https://www.jamesgmartin.center/2013/04/scientists-and-
engineers-need-literature/