Blinding science.(THE STRAGGLER)

MY son and I were, I'll admit it, a little miffed at not having won either First or Second Honors at the school science fair. We did get an

 
   Honorable Mention: "Which kind of glue 
   makes the strongest bond?" by Danny 
   Derbyshire. 

This was the Straggler family contribution. We had assembled five different kinds of adhesive, ranging from a Staples glue stick to an epoxy cement with a list of ingredients that looked to have been harvested on the planet Krypton, all spheno-" and "poly-" and "chloro-." We had cut ten lengths of wood and stuck them together in pairs, one pair per adhesive, assiduously following the instructions on each product. Each stuck-together pair had then been put in the angle of Dad's folding ladder, erected on the back lawn, and had barbell weights hung from one of its components until the adhesive bond broke. The weights had been recorded and conclusions duly arrived at.

It was an impressive piece of research, and we cannot understand why it rose no higher in the judges' estimation than Honorable Mention. What was so superior about Grant Siele's "Cleaning Pennies," Kerri-Ann Giambruno's "Short-Term Memory," or Sara Goldenbaum's "Melting Ice"? Ice melts, duh. (Though we agreed that Jacob Roday's "How Moldy Is My House?" was a superior piece of work--deserved some kind of special award for grossness, in fact. Jacob: "I like to experiment with disgusting things.")

When I was a little more than my son's present age there was much talk about the Two Cultures, following C. P. Snow's famous 1956 essay. Not having arrived at any worldly understanding by that point, and having just read H. G. Wells's The Time Machine, I picked up a vague notion that the human species was splitting into two, a development whose end result would see languid literary intellectuals in velvet jackets, smoking Gauloises and perhaps drinking absinthe, discussing Boileau and Virginia Woolf in the upper world, while technicians in lab coats toiled away in underground caverns to supply these cultivated loungers with medicines and gadgets.

I now understand (the better, since reading Roger Kimball's fine New Criterion essay about it) that Snow's concerns were largely misplaced, his view of literary culture stunted, and his claims for the scientific outlook exaggerated. The arts and humanities are not mere entertainment, to be turned to for relaxation after a busy day spent solving differential equations; they are our templates for living, for governing ourselves and our societies. Nor can science offer any help with the knottier problems besetting the human race. It can remedy bad smells, bad pains, and bad roads, but not bad behavior, bad government, or bad ideas.

I have, though, always nursed a great affection and respect for science. The humility of good scientists when confronted with plain facts is a beautiful thing to see. I would go so far as to say that it represents one of the greatest moral advances the human race has yet made. Steven Weinberg, in his book The First Three Minutes, says this about the ...