“I aspire to be an intellectual polygamist. And I deliberately use that metaphor to provoke with its sexual allusion and to point out the real difference to me between polygamy and promiscuity.”
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(from “The Last Days of the Polymath”, www.moreintelligentlife.com)
I am surprised by how often people still refer to the gaining of knowledge in such sexualized terms. From Francis Bacon’s definition of modern science as a “chaste and lawful marriage between Mind and Nature” to this modern chemist’s polygamous relationship with multiple fields of study, how does this kind of language affect how we think about science? about gender? about the practitioners of science?
