22 Words had a collection of technically correct but amusing and in some cases profound student answers to test questions. I had seen a lot of them before. I was particularly struck by the one I shared above. There is a sense in which “love” is bound to be the wrong answer to any question on a science exam. Nevertheless, there is a nice illustration here of the way that something can be a powerful and effective force without being the kind of answer appropriate in the domain of the natural sciences. We need more than one perspective on the world, and just as “love” is not the appropriate answer to a question about forces in the sense that physics or chemistry uses the term, so to chemistry and physics are not adequate answers to questions that deal with the human experience of love. They are part of the answer, to be sure. But they are not adequate on their own.
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