In further cross-discipline striving
Of breadth-versus-depth enterprising,
Past mys’tries, detailing
Through lens countervailing:
Find insights routine yet surprising.
The third July 2025 post takes a closer look at the book referenced in the last essay.
I was fortunate to double-major in both chemistry and English as an undergraduate. At that time, paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould was the primary science essayist of whom I was aware, as his work had been excerpted in several of the anthologies I read as part of my English courses. I then received The Hedgehog, the Fox, and the Magister’s Pox as a Christmas gift early in my graduate school career, soon after I had narrowed my academic path to chemistry.
Throughout my academic path, Gould’s book has been a helpful reminder of the broader interdisciplinary context in which I remain most interested.
In further cross-discipline striving /
Of breadth-versus-depth enterprising…
As alluded to in the last post, Gould’s final book surveys “breadth-versus-depth [“fox versus hedgehog”] enterprising” throughout some key episodes in the history of science. It was a challenging read, initially. When I first read it, I was still developing my fluency in chemistry. My discipline, moreover, was far afield from Gould’s expertise in natural history, which provided his own lens into studying the history of the sciences and humanities. Finally, given that my own interests had been supported by both of my home departments during my undergraduate work, I had not yet encountered academic tension between the fields in the way Gould describes.
However, this was a book that acknowledged and embodied the fact that investigations at the borders between academic disciplines exist, and it described some phenomena I would soon come to see in my own career. Contextualizing such observations has ultimately been quite helpful in my long-term academic path. I have come back to Gould’s text often, finding new insights in each instance of “cross-discipline striving.”
Past mys’tries, detailing /
Through lens countervailing…
Gould’s book provides a survey of scientific history that is broader than what is included in science-specific textbooks (at least in my experience). He first describes the context of the Renaissance as the re-birth of the interest in classical knowledge, a movement which formed the basis of what we now consider the humanities, and he highlights the complexity of how that time period intersects with the Scientific Revolution, with new emphasis on experiment and the scientific method. He reads scientific texts from past centuries, using his training from the humanities to read them closely in their historic context, and he acknowledges that this is a fundamentally different technique than scientists use in surveying their disciplinary literature when working on an experimental research question.
These broad points would’ve been extremely helpful with a distractingly key question I had as a science student: why was the language in science textbooks functioning so unusually, compared to my experience with other books? I still find it striking that the first text I encountered that specifically addressed such a topic used the “lens countervailing” of a non-science-specific viewpoint. (One of the things I’ve appreciated most about Gould’s book is the way it opened the door to additional reading, which I’ll come back to in a future post, but the word count here is already excessive, even for a summer essay.)
Find insights routine yet surprising.
Interdisciplinary fields such as the history of science, the philosophy of science, and science communication are well-established. I am aware that what I have found to be surprising realizations throughout my narrower, chemistry-specific career path constitute routine knowledge to scholars in these areas! I do think, though, that contextualizing points do have immense capacity to stand out to students in a given chemistry lesson, and as such, I have found it rewarding to supplement my chem-textbook-centric presentations with some of this broader information, over the past several years.
Chemphasis 