Don’t be intimidated by physics: it is made of stories and metaphors. Learn these and the field will open up to you
researches ultrahigh-energy cosmic rays with the Telescope Array Project at the University of Utah. She is the author of Subatomic Writing: Six Fundamental Lessons to Make Language Matter (2023) and writes a monthly science column for newspapers in Central New York. Her science essays have appeared in The Atlantic, Orion Magazine, Brevity Magazine, The Kenyon Review, and others.
C P Snow’s lecture ‘The Two Cultures’ (1959) argued that the perceived divide between scientists and literary scholars is narrower than commonly believed. They both fundamentally seek to understand and express the relationships that structure reality – whether human relationships in literature, or physical relationships in science.
In 1961, on the heels of that lecture, a children’s book came out – The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, a funny, punny allegorical fantasy that made the same argument but in a way that captivated readers well into the 1990s, when I first encountered this story: Milo, a boy already besieged by adult-like ennui and existential despair, takes on the quest to bring back the princesses Rhyme and Reason, reuniting them with their two quarrelsome brothers: King Azaz the Unabridged, Ruler of Dictionopolis, and the Mathemagician, Ruler of Digitopolis.
King Azaz claims that words are superior to numbers; the Mathemagician insists the reverse. In the end, the brothers reconcile and rebuild the City of Wisdom with the help of Rhyme and Reason, and Milo returns to his own world with renewed curiosity for words and numbers. By age 13, I’d already been convinced of the value of interdisciplinarity.
