Colin Bruzewicz
And, on a lighter note ...
So I don’t have a job, and while this might fill any other young man concerned with the source of his next meal with terror, I’m not too concerned. You see, for as long as I can remember my mother always told me I could do anything I wanted, and as I stand on this podium, never has this seemed more true. But shortly after I finish this speech and venture forth into the real world, I will actually have to put this hypothesis to the test.
Now some of you in the audience may be curious as to what an amateur physicist has to say on the virtues of liberal arts, but if you would be kind enough to indulge me for a second, all shall become clear. This may come as something of a surprise, but in my early years as a burgeoning physics student, the sources of my love of the subject were in fact not vectors, angular momenta, wavefunctions, and complicated integrals stretching as far as the eye could see.
Rather I was struck by the existence of a systematic method of examining the world, and having found it, I was content ... for a time. As anyone who knows me can attest, it doesn’t take me very long to find something to complain about, and it occurred to me as it must also to even the most intense physicist that at some point one must admit that the course of human history to date has possibly been dictated by something other than an all-consuming desire to minimize our potential energy. Having made this realization relatively early in my career, I also threw myself headfirst into the study of history, and I was infinitely pleased to find another systematic method of examining our world, albeit with monstrously different methods. “Lucky me,” I thought. “How nice that I’ve stumbled on the only two disciplines that do this world of ours justice."
It didn’t take me long to recognize my myopia on that one. Understanding the world is exactly what each and every one of us is trying to do! And although many different visions exist, we have the rare treat of being exposed to a great number of them as we formulate our own composite view of this increasingly complicated world.
Now plenty of you might be thinking, “Hey, this is just some unemployed punk kid. Why does he think he knows everything?” So I thought it might be appropriate to find some backup on this one. The world-renowned author and rather obscure butterfly taxonomist Vladimir Nabokov once said about these two paths of his career “that in a work of art that there is a kind of merging between the two things, between the precision of poetry and the excitement of pure science” (10). In my mind, we are all working on our own works of art: specifically the rest of our lives. But in order for that piece to be complete, I sincerely believe that we need to utilize all of these skills we have learned.
Or to put it another way, I would ask you to think of the pre-Lolita Nabokov in Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology hunched over his microscope, examining a butterfly no one has ever seen before. With a single lens, he can gather a great deal of information, but with a satchel full of lenses, he can discern intricacies that where formerly undetectable. Each discipline studied, each course passed, each professor challenged by, each fellow student argued with represents another lens we have, each of which reveals another detail that was formerly unseen.
These are the merits of the liberal arts.
So at the next interview where my next potential boss scoffs, “Physics and history, those don’t seem to have too much in common.” I can reply hopefully not too smugly, “Exactly."
But then again if that doesn’t pan out, everyone tells me that I have really pretty hands, so maybe I could model rings or bracelets or something.
Thanks.
Colin D. Bruzewicz, Phi Beta Kappa Speaker
Williams College Commencement, June 5, 2005