Science, Beauty and Creativity in America
Since I was a high school student, I’ve always appreciated broadcaster Charles Osgood, and his ability to capture a thought by telling good stories. Today on the way into the office, I heard this “Osgood File” radio segment.
In it, author Walter Isaacson talks about his fear that America has lost the creative spirit it was founded on, and dreams of ways we might recapture it. At the heart of it, he argues, is our inability to see science as a thing of beauty:
The beauty of our founding generation — founders of our country — was that they loved science. And nowadays, when people are a little bit wary of science, they don’t realize it’s beautiful. They don’t realize a mathematical equation is just the Good Lord’s brushstroke for painting something in physical reality…
[The segment is an excerpt from a longer piece that will air this weekend on "Sunday Morning" on CBS.]
