Scientists and Engineers Need

Literature
APR 7, 2013 Troy Camplin9 Comments

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
“Jabberwocky,” altering it thusly: “Eight slithy toves gyre and 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.