How do science and literature relate to today’s culture? Robert Harrison, a professor of French and Italian literature at Stanford University, explains on EpochTV’s “Bay Area Innovators” program how the two are intertwined.
“Galileo, for example, who belongs mostly to the physics department, was an extraordinary writer,” said Harrison. “Many of the even the more modern scientists like Alessandro Volta, who was so important, you know, for the electricity, was a poet as well. And then when you look at the more literary figures, people like Dante, who wrote ‘The Divine Comedy.’ He was much more than a poet, he also was at the vanguard of the astronomy of the Middle Ages, the physics and the architecture.”
