Introduction:

Twin Towers crumble. Black smoke rises into the pallid air. Snoring through history - fighting the inner battle between our desire for sleep and a good grade - one learns facts and devastating events that strike and shape the course of American history. These facts change the way we view the world, but who decides what we get to know and what should and should not be apart of a student’s curriculum? Why are certain massive and deadly events are not mentioned in our history books? How come King Leopold II was able to deceive millions of people and become a mass murderer of 8-10 million people and no one knew about it?

We know about the Holocaust, we know about Nine Eleven, but what about all the facts we do not know? Who is in control of the words within our textbook, because if we are simply reading and believing all that is before us, are we anything but vessels that people of power will empty their cunning manipulations into? As humans, is it enough to simply “believe that we are safe?" Are all the facts that are being shoved into our faces true? Or are the facts biased to the opinions and main goal of powers beyond us? These questions have the power to change the entire world, so here I am to ask them.

How science is empowered by the English language:

Scoffing at Heart of Darkness and their AP literature teacher from the hour before, a group of boys enter the AP physics classroom. Distaste and dismissal of the relevance and importance of english and literature, something I commonly saw, was growing a weed in the tangle of my thoughts. The physics teacher himself chimed in to contribute his mockery for the “unimportance of English” and the massive superiority of the science community. I saw a rooted problem beneath my feet.

The importance of English and the study of literature continues to diminish in the eyes of training elite scientists. I was a training elite scientist. Although my peers thought that science could answer all questions about the universe, I dared to ask them the question that they could not answer - why? Prodigies, trust fund kids, and arrogant boys all thought they knew the answers - but the truth lies beyond the surface of the ground - possibly beyond the forces of light and energy and within the poetry of Macbeth and futuristic warnings of 1984.

This is where science and the English language converge.

I believe that when we think we know it all, that is when we have not learned enough. All I know is that many scientists believe that they are mightily superior to English because it is not “definitive”. It is often seen as the “weaker subject,” the “time waster” that takes time away from “solving real issues that only science can understand.” English has always come naturally to me.

Although, growing up I started to believe the lie that English was for the kids who could not handle the real stuff, the hard stuff, the science. This has caused me to seek the answers within my life of “where is the line drawn between science and the English language”? Here I am today, I sit with success from all my rigorous high school science courses and I think about all the things that English teaches the world that science does not. Perhaps Science is the HOW and English is the WHY.

My point is simple. The superiority of science is not all it appears to be. Books like Macbeth and King Leopold’s Ghost and Macbeth all warn of us a world where people become unloving, unmoral souls who believe and take in whatever is placed before them. As a scientist I need to remember to tell the world that the information that we are given and that we present must be challenged. Why? Because the very science that tells us the world is a certain way could be a modern day example of the the warnings all these books of the past tell us about. Reading is power, because we do not live long enough to repeat the mistakes of the past.

“Scientists” must seek innovation past what is placed before them, while opening their time and minds to the wise books of the past; then we may solve real world problems.