We believe in interdisciplinary education. We believe that all subjects are intimately related, yet these relationships are often ignored by teachers who focus on their own areas of specialization and by textbooks which are written by specialists. We believe that one cannot learn science independently of philosophy, logic, literature, mathematics, economics, art, language, etc. Science, without these other disciplines is sterile indeed! However, we also believe that a course in literature, in the absence of science, is also sterile. Nevertheless, we dare not confuse the methods of science with the methods employed by other disciplines. Our responsibility is to do science. Thus we believe that in this class we are as much helping to stimulate poets as chemists. This obviously has affected our selection of subject matter.

While students naturally associate science with mathematics and technology, we believe that the sciences and the arts should be a much closer association. From a technical standpoint, mathematics is usually the language of choice to be used in the physical sciences, hence the superficial association. However mathematics is a language and is more closely related to other languages. Meanwhile, the arts and sciences frequently pose the same questions so that their answers are likely to be intertwined, although different in form.

We believe that a major responsibility of any science course should be to help students understand how science fits into one’s overall education. In its absence, teachers hear students uttering such illogical statements as “I love science but I hate French”, or “I love history but I hate science.” How can one communicate one’s love (science) in France without wanting to speak, listen to, and read French? How can one possibly understand history without learning to understand the science which drives it?

How about a lecture on why every English classroom should have a periodic table? Here is a quotation file on the language of mathematics and whether or not the language is spoken by man, god, or nature. A paper written exclusively for our science department handbook about the similarities and differences between the arts and sciences is closely related to these concepts

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