Science and Thought

          A girl asked me while I was having a few drinks at my friends house, why I had gotten into a science major? I told them because I enjoyed understanding how things worked in the world around me and I satisfied some Nietzschistic desires of mine to support the world in it's progression. As if my answer were prosaic she said that she didn't understand why anybody would go into something as boring as a science major. I was a little confused so I asked why she felt science was boring and to what aspects of other majors did it lack luster in comparison to. She looked around for a little bit in contemplation and said that she wasn't sure but it just bored her to have to look at numbers all day. She said it wasn't about the money it was about self vindication and walked into the other room. Still sitting in the recently abandoned room, I thought about what had just happened.

          I've had a feeling since college that anybody that I talked to from a liberal arts major had felt that my choice in major was less interesting or less emotionally satisfying. It was just a strange intonation when they spoke about science that made me feel like they didn't think I was getting enough maturity from my subject. I disagree with that because I've arrived at many philosophical points because of math and had even more of them reinforced because of later discovered math. Also, many of my thoughts on productivity and creation have arisen and been solidified by the patience it takes to pursue a math or science degree. This argument between liberal arts and science, dwindles after college but the remnants still come up in conversation and are strange to me. I understand why people would be interested in history, languages, art, photography, music, acting, etc and because I've asked myself why they would go into their majors. I can place myself into everyone of those jobs and see interesting and inspiring things about them all, so why is this so difficult to do when the roles are reversed. There must be something about mathematics, computers, chemistry, biology that mystifies people's interests and steers them to the liberal world. There has to be something that gives the sciences the repulsive status that it's achieved with so many college students.

          To be interested in a subject is to be be confident in your ability to interpret the subject and further our understanding of it. If you wanted to learn about poetry you would have to know the language in which you were attempting to learn poetry first. Hard learning is learning from nothing and easy learning is building upon things that you already know. Topics like history and english are easy learning because we have spent our entire lives using these subjects and building upon them but subjects like mathematics and foreign language are considered hard learning because we are presumably building on little or  nothing. I've heard that mathematics is difficult because it's a subject that isn't natural to us but I feel like it's even more natural than english. While we learn english to read, write and speak we learn mathematics to describe the world around us. At this time we learn to speak while we also learn how to count and describe the world around us using numbers. English is how we associate objects, feelings, events, etc.

I think I've vented enough about this subject but this topic has been brought up a few times in the last year I felt like it needed to be addressed. Hope everybody enjoyed this and if you have anything to add to this or other post, feel free to leave a comment.

Thanks,
Joseph Priest