What Are Nature's Laws?

A lot of learning can be a dangerous thing-particularly when it becomes so highly specialized that only the specialists can understand it. How can the specialists and their knowledge be used to bring men together instead of setting them farther apart? Last week, at New York University, a group of scholars drawn from five major campuses had a bold suggestion: a special course, called "the frontier of knowledge," that covers everything from plants to paleontology, from the stars to the "world of quanta."

The man who got the scholars together is himself neither scholar nor scientist. Frederick Leon Kunz is a University of Wisconsin graduate who once headed a Buddhist college in Ceylon, later became a free-lance lecturer, and three years ago founded the Foundation for Integrated Education. The purpose of the foundation is to go deeper than any system of "general education." It is not enough, says Kunz, to dump a few facts from one field into another; it is far more important to go after the basic concepts behind the facts. As it is, most specialists don't even know what the score is, outside their own fields. Biologists are still apt to think in terms of 19 Century physics, physicists in terms of outmoded psychology, and psychologists in terms of outmoded chemistry. The first job of the foundation, therefore, is to bring all the specialists up to date. Then, says Kunz, the specialists can begin to discover what concepts they hold in common.

Some of these links are already beginning to appear. Physics and psychology, for instance, were once miles apart, one dealing with a mechanistic universe made up of measurable and observable particles, the other with fleeting and intangible emotion. But in the world of quanta, the physicists have begun to believe that forces can be transmitted where no particles exist -on waves as fleeting, intangible and unpredictable as emotion itself. In the eyes of both physicists and psychologists, therefore, man and the universe are beginning to present a common problem: the study of forces that cannot be visualized and that follow no rigid rules of cause & effect. Out of such common ways of thinking, says Kunz, some general pattern may come, and Kunz's scholars are looking for that pattern not only in N.Y.U.'s star-studded course, but in allied research projects on campuses throughout the nation. The foundation's scholars do not expect to find a quick panacea for a splintered world. But in years to come, they hope, there may emerge a new universal system, aided and abetted by what science has discovered about the laws of nature. Education's task, says Kunz, is to determine what the basic laws of nature are, and then make them common property: "It's as simple as that."

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