[T]he Great Books of science--and they do exist: viz., Euclid's
Elements, Newton's
Principia--simply don't occupy the same
place in the scientific world that the Great Books hold in the
humanities and related disciplines. No half-decent undergraduate
curriculum, for example, would allow its literature students to escape
deep familiarity with
Hamlet, its philosophy majors to avoid
studying
The Republic, its classicists to skimp on the
Odyssey, its divinity students not to delve deeply into the
Bible, or its budding political scientists to pass on
The Prince.
But few geometers feel any need to familiarize themselves with
geometry as Euclid explained it; nor do physicists feel incomplete
without understanding Newton's original notation for his laws of
motion. And I would much sooner encourage students to master a few
basic college texts in math, sciences and engineering than push them
to grapple with the same concepts by studying the original works that
introduced them. The originals, after all, each represented one
farsighted individual's brilliant-but-still-hazy insight, which has
since been clarified and extended far beyond that first attempt at
elucidation.
That's one of the key distinctions between the "two cultures": science
seeks to separate its ideas from individual humans, and to place them in
an abstract world where not only objectivity but also impersonality
reigns. No serious student of literature would argue, like the hero of
"
Metropolitan", that
reading critical essays about great literary works is better than
reading the originals. The reason is that the ideas in literary
works--or, for that matter, philosophical, historical or religious
ones--are bound to the original thinker (and his or her original words)
in a way that scientific ideas are not. Plato's Republic stands above
any recapitulation of it--even one that many consider brilliant and
original in its own right--because Plato's ideas come only from Plato,
and understanding them requires as direct a link as possible to him.