Brenton Dickieson has a discussion going at A Pilgrim in Narnia about C.S. Lewis’s opinion that reading old books is good for you. I have always agreed with that, despite the fact that it sometimes makes me talk funny. That statement immediately raises the question, “how old does he mean”? Brent takes the minimum of the set {ages of books mentioned by CSL in that piece}, and gets 50 years. Surprisingly young, for a medievalist. I would have expected 10 times that.
Obviously (I say, as is customary when I’m about to prove myself wrong), the definition of “old” is determined by the discipline within which one is working. The humanities change slowly, so a “research methods” class in a state-of-the-art university might have us reading St. Augustine, and people still care what Sir Philip Sidney had to say.
The sciences change faster: in 1989 I got some sidelong looks for citing a paper from 1962 [1]. Engineering changes faster still: I am now so old that I’ve written things that are indistinguishable from old books. At the extreme, computer software changes like quicksilver. One of my co-workers retired last week and left his books behind. His books unquestionably contained archaic thinking, despite the fact that some of them were published this year. Glibly phrased, by the time a book about software can get to your shelf, it’s obsolete.
There’s always an exception that proves me wrong, though. My Relativity professor was the extraordinary E. A. Desloge. One day in lecture, he mentioned that St. Augustine had actually asked the right question to have discovered the Theory of Relativity. Augustine asked, “Is time the same for everyone, or does each person have their own?” I believe Prof. Desloge was paraphrasing Confessions XI. Alas for the history of science, Augustine believed there was a Preferred Observer and he built his entire cosmology around Him. But as far as we’re concerned here, this is a definite case of a modern physicist reading a very old book.
[1] Skyrme, T. . (1962). “A unified field theory of mesons and baryons”. Nuclear Physics 31: 556–569. Bibcode:1962NucPh..31..556S. doi:10.1016/0029-5582(62)90775-7.
Ross Nunamaker
I recognize the point is reading older works, which I always think is good for perspective, but there is the additional aspect of literally reading an old book, which just feels good in the hands.
Joe
True. Reminds me of reading an old book from my grandfather’s attic. I discovered the back half of the book I was reading was uncut. I was utterly baffled about what to do next.
Brenton Dickieson
Thanks for putting this in new perspective, Joe. When I was an undergrad, “old” was more than 20 years.