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As we all know there are two academic cultures:
the natural sciences and the humanities.
These two cultures are normally carefully separated from each other
in almost all universities.
Each one in its respective building, separated by several worlds.
Typically, members of these specialities can’t quite communicate with each other very well
The question is: Where does this problem really come from?
To begin with, I'd like to tell you the story of two discoveries.
One of them in the year 1754. In 1754 a private teacher
is at home in Prussia
thinking about the cosmos.
Without making use of measuring devices and without any mathematical formula
he writes a small book in which
he explains the origin of the cosmos.
He is so proud of his work that he sent a copy to the king of Prussia,
Frederick the Great, who received it in 1755.
And this king, Frederick the Great, has even a chair,
a vacant chair in Metaphysics and Logic,
that was announced in 1756 but won't be occupied, as Frederick
the Great has other concerns than astronomy at that time: He is preparing
the Seven Year's War.
So the work of this teacher has no effect
and sinks into oblivion for 100 years.
The name of this work is "Universal Natural History
and Theory of the Heavens".
And the initiated among you will know who wrote this book:
its author was Immanuel Kant.
It is undoubtedly surprising that in the year 1754 it was still possible
to write something truly revolutionary about cosmology
without performing any natural scientific experiments.
In 1796, Laplace proposed the Nebular Hypothesis, which
virtually contained the same content
and went down as celebrity in natural history
because he actually was a natural scientist.
As early as 1796, every one expected general theories about the cosmos
to be made not so much by philosophers
as by scientists, at least it was so
in France
and England. Not so in Germany where the ominous influence of some
philosophers on scientific research was more significant
especially on biology.
This is the first story. 1754,
an outstanding cosmology which even today is admired
by contemporary physicists, written at home without experiments at all.
Now comes the second story. We travel 30 years forward in time to the year 1784.
Again we find a highly ambitious young man.
This young man
studied law
and since two years he is Minister of Finance in Weimar.
But he also does medical experiments - most of the time he is just watching -
in the Anatomy Tower in Jena.
Along with a teacher he observes skulls,
human skulls.
And suddenly
he thinks he has found something. Something that he will be so proud of
all his life
so that everything that made him famous later seemed to him insufficient
compared to this discovery.
Then beneath his Theory of Colours, Goethe believed that his discovery
of the Intermaxillary Bone was his greatest scientific achievement.
The problem with this story is that four years before Goethe
the French physician Vicq d' Azyr had written a detailed treaty
about the Intermaxillary Bone.
Why do I tell you these two stories? There is a clear explanation:
both stories are separated by 30 years.
Certainly, luck and chance do play a role here.
Certainly it also plays a role that Kant had a different temperament than Goethe,
and perhaps he was even more careful with what he did
and maybe he hit the target when he was shooting in the dark instead of doing
speculative talk...
But this is not all.
I'm heading for those 30 years that passed between 1754 and 1784.
Because in this time many things happened.
This is actually the time when natural sciences
and humanities became so distant from each other
that from now on it was almost impossible for an outsider
to contribute significantly to the natural sciences.