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I really liked reading this article because it relates to something I was thinking about today. One of my 'interdisciplinary' classes, "Environment and Society", has many students from different majors and today we had a discussion about how to define terms like science, social science, and humanities. We found that it was quite difficult to separate science from humanities, because both disciplines use similar techniques to view the world, its hard to say which is more subjective and and which is more objective.
A big argument arose between an english major and someone representing a science major. The english major stated that science is not as subjective as reading a poem, for instance. Many interpretations can be made about the author's meaning, the time frame it was written in, and the time frame it is being analyzed in. On the other hand, the science major was arguing that science is more subjective, because the questions a scientist poses, the experiments he/she performs, and the data that one decides to keep and to throw away is quite subjective.
The stubbornness of the english major to accept that science is not just number crunching or mixing chemicals reminded me how much people take science as a dry and dead subject, that one can only study the subject and not live it, not research or create as the humanities do.
I remember that America is something like 48th in the world in science and I try to think back to a time before I was born when the race for space was new and exciting and everyone wanted to be or marry an astronaut. What Greene says, "We rob science education of life when we focus solely on results and seek to train students to solve problems and recite facts without a commensurate emphasis on transporting them out beyond the stars" really rings in my ears and I feel badly that people are not inspired to create and observe the natural and physical world as well as that of the mind and human experience.