If you are not a classics aficionado and don’t speak Greek, your only experience with Greek letters is likely either from MIT frats or high school physics and math classes. As a prospective physics major who spent a disproportionate amount of time in Founders and is halfway through a Classics major track, I have to confess that my Greek letters were originally taught by physicists. In Greek classes, my handwriting is often despised by my classmates for being too physics-esque. However, in the physics arena, my most important job becomes the go-to authority for authentic Greek letter pronunciation and penmanship. The disaster of butchering Greek often happens when we physicists run out of all the common Greek letters in quantum mechanics and are forced to use xi, chi, and psi. While I am disheartened to see my physics peers struggling with those little wiggles, I often wonder – why not save them from this linguistic chaos with a crash course in real Greek?

Let me clarify that the idea is not out of nowhere. Our very own physics department has a class called: “PHYS 102: Physics for future presidents.” The course description proposes a compelling question: What basic physics should all future leaders know? Further investigation suggests that future presidents need to learn the physics behind topics such as nuclear weapons and space exploration. While I was scrolling through the course browser, an idea suddenly came to me: what if we not only teach the physicists basic Greek letters, but everything they need to know about Western classical world, in a way that caters to some STEM-oriented brains? 

So how to teach classics to physics students? An insight from Physics 102 is that physics can be understood conceptually as a list of interesting facts without its technical aspects. Future presidents can perfectly distinguish the difference between nuclear fusion and nuclear fission just through the concept of combining and splitting nuclei without any math. If we follow the same philosophy, physicists definitely do not need to sit and figure out what the original texts mean, even in translation. Everything important in the classical world can be summarized succinctly just like physics definitions. “The second law of thermodynamics states that the state of entropy in an isolated system will increase over time.” “Plato’s Republic states that the state and individual can be analyzed through a three-part structure.” To be more STEM-friendly, this class might as well be pset-based instead of essay-based and fulfill the LL distributional requirement so that physicists will never suffer another writing seminar in their college career. 

What will Wellesley physicists get out of CLCV 102, other than a mastery of Greek on an alphabetic level, and maybe some cool classics facts (for example, that Socrates was voted to death or Helen was actually from Sparta)? Or maybe that’s enough, since now we will never be accused of butchering Greek, and our ego will be restored through some literature trivia bowl in confrontation with Olin and MIT engineers. 

Sorry to be underwhelming. But it seems that CLCV 102 can only get you this far. The physics way of teaching classics completely misses the point of what physics or all STEM majors can learn by sitting in the same room with classics, history and philosophy majors. Similarly, when we are adjusting STEM classes with the pragmatic purpose of either creating an easy way out for distributional requirements or serving as a crash course filling some knowledge gap in their own specialization, some crucial learning experiences are lost. We might get pieces of facts that would be marginally beneficial to our major track, but through this way, the most valuable part of being exposed to different subjects in their most authentic form is always unattainable — the different perspective it offers. Physicists need to learn classics not only to have a perfect Greek pronunciation but to be inspired by how ancient Greek philosophers incorporated their understanding of nature into their philosophy. Liberal arts college requires physicists to register for an actual humanities course, thus forming a class with people from different academic backgrounds. This not only lets us gain knowledge in that specific field but also allows us to communicate with peers specializing in areas that are drastically different from ours in an academic setting. Only in this way can we realize how different people perceive the world in different ways and how your area of study is actively in conversation with other fields. 

So, as I enthusiastically typed out an entire syllabus of CLCV 102 at one in the morning on Thursday, a revelation dawned on me: we don’t need a carefully designed classics, literature or humanities class just for physics students. Physics students need to immerse themselves in the real humanities and literature classrooms instead of a crash course on humanity – just as I envision history or classics scholars registering for an introduction to quantum mechanics class, which has marginal math requirements, but provides an insight into physicists’ intuitive grasp of the universe.

Therefore, as a higher education bastion, Wellesley bears the duty of bridging scientific academia with the real world, and the best way to sharpen future scientists’ language finesse is through humanities immersion. Likewise, cultivating scientific literacy is more impactful in actual STEM courses than in broad surveys for non-majors. Rather than crafting “Physics for Poets” or “Classics for Physics,”  our focus should be on making an intro-level STEM or humanities class more accessible to people who have not been exposed to the field. Scientists need an eye for beauty and art, while humanities folks benefit from scientific literacy to engage the world with both reason and intuition. Academia is not isolated from the real world, and physics is never isolated from the humanities and ethics.