Hummingbird and Passionflowers, Martin Johnson Heade, MET
When I arrived at Columbia, the Science Core was the course requirement that I most dreaded. As a prospective English major who had loathed physics in high school, the prospect of squandering three class slots on the sciences felt annoying at best and extremely frustrating at worst. To make matters worse, the other students I knew who did take Science Core–satisfying courses in my first couple years of college weren’t keen on them; the way they described it, the classes consisted of vast amounts of memorization of facts that they weren’t particularly interested in.
I let my first two years at Columbia pass without enrolling in any science classes, but when my junior year was approaching I decided that it was time to bite the bullet, especially since I would be abroad in the spring. I spent a while looking carefully at the different options, trying to find something with content that I would find at least somewhat interesting. I eventually settled on a class called “Human Origins and Evolution,” the introductory course for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology majors. I remembered high school biology as a dreary time filled with memorization of terms that had all since been forgotten (except, strangely, for the definition of mitochondria). Still, the theory of evolution seemed interesting enough, not only for the way that it explained who we were but also for the effect that it had had on religious belief.
To my delight and surprise, in our second class the professor was talking in vivid language about exactly this subject. She told us that Darwin had vomited almost every day during the months leading up to the publication of On the Origin of Species, terrified and anxious about the effect his work would have on belief in God. Although my professor said early on that she didn’t think that belief in God was incompatible with the theory of evolution, her lectures often made me wonder. The thoroughness with which we learned about the randomness of the variations that were ultimately the backbone of evolution seemed to me to pose a serious challenge to traditional belief. The result was that I was thinking about a question that had long interested me in a completely new way, one which was only really accessible through the sciences. By the time I was preparing for the final exam, thinking about Neanderthals and different ape family structures, the different modes of evolution and the first humans, I felt like a new part of my brain had been activated.
The next fall, when I decided to take my second Science Core class, I was less pessimistic than I had been last time. And sure enough, my eye was immediately caught by a class that Brian Greene—who I remembered for his lively Fro Sci lectures—was teaching that seemed designed for humanities students. The class was called “Origins and Meaning,” and the course description explained that we would consider, among other things, “the very far future, where we will encounter the likely demise of all complex matter, all life and all consciousness. In the face of such disintegration we will examine the nature of value and purpose.” I was hooked. My excitement grew when I saw the syllabus, which included short stories by Tolstoy, Kafka, and Borges alongside movies by Ingmar Bergman and Charlie Kaufman.
Like the evolution class before it, Origins and Meaning ended up having a real effect on how I thought about topics that I was already interested in—meaning, religion, free will. I was particularly affected by Professor Greene’s detailed descriptions of how everything in the universe—life, stars, black holes—would one day disappear. In the back of my mind, I suppose, I had known that this would happen. But I had never had it so clearly laid out before me, and certainly not by a renowned physicist. And although it was hard to explain, the disappearance of everything—what Virginia Woolf called “the perishing of the stars”—did change how I thought about purpose. It drove home to me in a way that nothing else really had that meaning can really only come on a small scale, from things like our relationships and our jobs and our interests. The farther out we look for purpose, the harder it becomes to find it.
As my time at Columbia nears its end, I can’t help but feel quite grateful for my two Science Core classes. The thought of taking them would never have occurred to me had they not been required, but they both ended up broadening my intellectual horizons in unexpected and valuable ways. A requirement that had seemed burdensome turned out to be a hidden gem.