Together with the use of original music and state of the art interactive media, the website will invite a large crossover audience, including the serious student and the thrill-seeking web surfer. In a word, Retro diction will make chaos lit hip. Carl Sagan's PBS series Cosmos was the most watched series in public-television history. The audience for classic literature, in contrast, has dwindled in recent years, possibly because literature has not been adapted to new sensibilities and new media forms. A better dialogue between the humanities and the sciences is absolutely vital and, fortunately, more possible now than ever before.
Holistic explanations have a place beside analytical ones.
We now have a positive and optimistic alternative to the postmodern philosophy of radical indeterminacy, which privileged the experience of discontinuity. Supporting neither essentialism nor extreme relativism, Retro diction offers a way of exploring both liberal and conservative points of view. The goal of the project, in terms of impact on the public's knowledge and interest in science, is to explore the often over-looked philosophical implications of science. This is the area in which the arts and sciences most overlap and which will attract the most diverse audiences. This is also the area that relates science to everyday life.