If someone walks up to random people and says, “I have a theory of gravity,” almost nobody will listen. Unless they’ve got the right credentials — the right letters after their name — people tune out. But if someone says, “I have a story to tell,” suddenly ears perk up. People get curious.

When someone says, “I have a theory,” they’re challenging the existing order of knowledge. The listener’s first instinct is to defend: Who are you to make a claim about reality? Centuries of cranks and false prophets have trained us to be cautious. Science demands trust, and trust demands proof.

If there’s one thing good about academia in the sciences — despite its flaws — it’s the insistence on rigor. That’s why we trust the sounds coming from the hallways of science. There are some gates worth keeping.

But everyone, by virtue of being human, has the right to tell stories — and many will listen willingly. A story doesn’t demand anything. It gives freely, asking only for a little time. Most importantly, it doesn’t ask the listener to revise their beliefs.

Science has become too sterile. Yes, we need the rigor. But we also need the stories, the music, the myth, the dance not apart from physics, but within and based on physics. We need people of all temepraments and personalities, not simply the uber analytic geniuses who know nothing about anything else and feel like dead machines that takes in caffeine and gives out equations on paper. Science needs culture entretched in it, formally, as part of it. The goal of science should not simply be theory after theory after theory, nor simply technology after technology, but it must also be enriching all the sensual aspects of the human experience.

I'm reminded of and feel the company of Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan in this dream.