Some of the great innovators of our time gained renown for their ability to bridge

disparate worlds. Steve Jobs changed our lives with technology by joining

artistry with engineering. Arthur Zients approaches our lives with technology as

both a physicist and a contemplative. Integrating sciences and the humanities is

simply a way of talking as he puts it about bringing all of who we are to all

that the world is. And he says we can investigate life as vigorously from

the inside as from the outside. I'm Chris to tip it. This is on being. I spoke

with Arthur Zients in 2010. He is an emeritus professor of physics at Amherst

College. He has long drawn on an eclectic range of thinkers alongside his

science, such as the 18th century writer Gerta and the early 20th century

philosopher and educator Rudolph Steiner. Arthur Zients grew up reconciling a

mix of cultures and ways of being in the world. His father was from a largely

illiterate Polish immigrant family. His mother from a cultured world of

southern gentility. After childhood he rejected the Catholic piety they did

share. He sought meaning in science. But clarity as he tells it did not come in

his first years in college. And that was made harder perhaps by the cultural

turmoil of that era of the Vietnam War. Arthur Zients was about to flunk out when

he turned a new corner after an unexpected conversation. There was one

professor of physics who seemed rather interesting, older gentleman. He opened

up about his own spiritual quest, if you will. So here's the 60-year-old

eminently sensible physicist at the University of Michigan. And after telling

me, I had basically gotten a D in the course and I think that was a gift. We began

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