When Science Meets Arts

A good liberal arts education allows the student to flit between disciplines before settling into one

- Saikat Majumdar

HERE is my key advice to smart and ambitious young people in 21st-century India:

“If you are attracted to different subjects, don’t choose between them. Go for them both.” Feeling torn between disparate subjects is the best possible thing. It is a mark of genuine liveliness and curiosity. It is such a good thing that I recommend it to everyone. To those of you who don’t feel torn between incompatible things—those who know what you love and are monogamous about it—try to cultivate a disciplinary field that is quite different from, even incompatible with your primary interest.

Contra-disciplinarity is the best model of liberal ‘art-science’ education. It is also its exciting future. Dual majors such as computer science and english, or music and computer science embody high models of contra-disciplinary education. Philosophy and physics might form a similar pair, as old as it is new, a timeless classic. Their shared interest in explaining the universe is split between the natural, the human, and the spiritual. Between concrete reality through the senses and larger patterns that appear as abstract—between experience and data on one hand, and theory on the other, both moving toward the latter through the means of mathematics—the ultimate symbolic system of abstract language.