Richard Tsuyuki wrote: >This leads to a pet philosophical question of mine: is there objective >value in art? Does it make any sense to say that Beethoven is "better" >(in an encompassing sense) than Britney Spears, or that "Karamazov" is >a "better" book than "The Firm"? Does Beethoven make me a better person, >happier, more able to contribute to society, than Britney? I feel like >telling people to see "Casablanca" and avoid "Titanic", but why? If >they enjoy "Titanic" immensely, is there anything unfortunate in that? >Or should I rather be embarrassed by a lack of attendance history at >monster-truck rallies? Also, what about science and other fields of >knowledge? Should one be embarrassed by lack of familiarity with quantum >chromodynamics? With Hilbert space? How to transplant a kidney? Urdu? >Zoroastrianism? The history of the World Series? Is there something >that makes us feel that the arts contribute to humanity in a more generally >applicable way than other fields? Certainly there is probably a consensus regarding mathematics and physics (the fields with which I am familiar); these fields have been so vast, since the early 20th century at latest, that nobody could possibly be a generalist and nobody should be ashamed at not being one. The last generalists were probably people like Helmholtz and Kelvin in the late 19th century, who contributed to a vast range of topics. I remember a wonderful story about Paul Erd=C3=B6s, the great number theoretician. He happened to be in a lecture room where an unsolved problem in functional analysis - an utterly different field - was chalked up on the blackboard. After asking someone what some of the symbols meant (!!), in a couple of hours he had produced a proof, and it was not a trivial problem. But that is exceptional, possibly unique, virtuosity ... Alastair