Great Minds Don’t Think Alike presents conversations among leading scientists, philosophers, historians, and public intellectuals that exemplify openness to diverse viewpoints and the productive exchange of ideas. Pulitzer and Templeton Prize winners, MacArthur “genius” grant awardees, and other acclaimed writers and thinkers debate the big questions: who we are, the nature of reality, science and religion, consciousness and materialism, and the mysteries of time. In so doing, they also inquire into how uniting experts from different areas of study to consider these topics might help us address the existential risks we face today. Convened and moderated by the physicist and author Marcelo Glaser, these public dialogues model constructive engagement between the sciences and the humanities—and show why intellectual cooperation is necessary to shape our collective future.
Contributors include David Chalmers and Antonio gomasio; Sean Carroll and B. Alan Wallace; Patricia Church land and Jill Tarter; Rebecca Goldstein and Alan Light man; Jimena Canals and Paul Davies; Ed Borden and Mark O’Connell; Elizabeth Robert and Siddhartha Mukherjee; Jeremy Silva, David Grin spoon.
The meteoric growth of many fields of scientific knowledge in the past three centuries has led to a model of niche-knowledge. In the sciences, we are trained to be technically adept in a specific subfield; those who dare to cross fields before tenure are usually punished (read: refused tenure). The same hyper-specialization model has percolated through the humanities. Just as typical laser physicists don’t understand astrophysicists, scholars of Classics don’t research Edmund Husserl or Jorge Luis Borges. There are, of course, exceptions, but in both arenas, they are rare. While this focus is required for success in academia, it clashes with the intellectual openness necessary to learn from other fields of inquiry.
This entrenchment of knowledge influences our worldview and the way we teach. Snow’s lament was meant as a wake-up call, an invitation, as yet unheeded, to promote intellectual openness and curiosity. To want to learn from another person, even one with interests far removed from your field of research or with different political or cultural viewpoints, is essential if we are to face the daunting challenges that threaten civilization.
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS, FEBRUARY 2022
The roots of this unfortunate split between the two cultures reach back beyond the Enlightenment and its discontents, having been amplified by an increasingly successful scientific enterprise and the consequent technologization of society. The seventeenth century marked a turning point in human intellectual history, where what we now call the sciences started to carve their own path away from the Greek philosophical tradition. Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Boyle, and many others took off as natural philosophers, concerned with the workings of nature as their Greek and Islamic forefathers had been, but now armed with a powerful new methodology whereby direct experimentation and data analysis were to describe a variety of terrestrial and celestial phenomena with mathematical precision. Their spectacular success changed the way we understand the cosmos and our place in it, creating, as a byproduct, a deep spiritual rift that has never been healed. If the human mind can understand the workings of the world without apparent limitations, what room, then, is there for mystery? For spiritual questioning? If the world is truly machine-like, operating under strict mathematical logic, what room then for doubt, for free will?
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