Sarah Kearns
Welcome to EquilibriUM, a science, technology, enginering, art, math, & medicine (STEAMM) magazine brought to you by MiSciWriters! This print magazine project started as a way to celebrate MiSciWriters’ fifth anniversary (in September 2020) and explore the interesting ways that science fits into other disciplines. I’ve had the immense honor of being a part of the MiSciWriters community during my entire graduate school career and have served as the editor-in-chief the past almost two years. But there’s so much more in this world beyond science – even just within UMich research – and I wanted to bring the team’s expertise in editing and storytelling to a more interdisciplinary space. This magazine serves as a sort of test bed, exploring what we could be doing and what stories we should be sharing.
Science, medicine, engineering, and technology have all fundamentally altered the way we structure our institutions. There are miracles and mishaps both in the uptake of STEM into the fabric of how we function as humans. The promise of science as a means to understand and better our world goes back to the age of enlightenment, where rationality and objectivity were seen as means to conquer Nature. In a boom of scientific exploration, fields like astronomy, psychology, and chemistry established themselves and are some of the foundations of science themselves, in the pursuit of overcoming Nature and tradition. It’s easy to see how and where enlightenment thinkers went wrong, both in concept and in practice, in hindsight centuries later. That said, at the time critique was ongoing though in the space of art and literature. One must look no farther than Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, now integrated into science ethics curricula, to see where literature critiques research practices and personalities. As a scientist however, it’s easy to feel hopeful at understanding the surrounding world without grasping the complex connections between entities until one is disturbed. While my research will never be extremely high-impact, I can imagine that the team on the Manhattan Project were excited to find a way to apply theoretical physics and end WWII, not really imagining, by naivety or avoidance, the impact it would have on international environment, culture, and politics, impacts we still feel today.
As naive as it was to think that society’s solutions lie in science, thinking that incorporating arts and humanities will completely solve our problems is equally as shortsighted. Nevertheless, the dichotomy between arts and science has always been a fallacious one. Integrating culture, society, and craft into medicine, technology, and science opens the vague concept of “understanding” to mean so much more than the cartoon schematic in a textbook. Certainly such models display concepts in an accessible way, but complexity can be lost in this type of reduction. Here at EquilibriUM, we think that introducing complexity through lenses outside of science and outside of STEM brings a refreshing richness to our research narratives, by integrating mythology into psychology (Mocked, Garay), personifying scientific processes (Transformation, Lao), calling for accessible education (Mentorship, Ju), how our families shape our lives (No Lab Coat Required, Baker), changing theories based on new information (Recognizing the “I” in Science, DeLacey), and thinking about how technology impacts our thinking (Different Perspective, Kearns).
These articles and illustrations in this magazine by our amazing team of graduate students embody the etymology of our magazine’s namesake: equal and balanced. While the world and our interactions in it will continue to fluctuate, I hope that you find composure and solace here flipping through tangible pages and engaging with these stories. Remember to take the time and dwell in the complexity and perhaps you’ll find the answers to questions in unexpected places.
Of course, man cannot live by engineering alone. He is a loving, playful, wisdom-seeking, beauty-adoring creature, and deprived of the animating spirit of art and philosophy, his life is barren and his greatest works are as naught.
Samuel C. Florman
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering
~sarah
Editor-in-Chief
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