It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
In the half-century since, “the two cultures” has become a “bumper-sticker phrase,” as NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a 2007 speech. (Naturally, as a scientist, Griffin also declared that Snow had hit on an “essential truth.”) And Snow has certainly been enlisted in some unlikely causes. Writing in Newsweek in 1998, Robert Samuelson warned that our inability to take the Y2K computer bug more seriously “may be the ultimate vindication” of Snow’s thesis. (It wasn’t.) Some prominent voices in academia have also refashioned his complaint. “We live in a society, and dare I say a university, where few would admit — and none would admit proudly — to not having read any plays by Shakespeare,” Lawrence Summers proclaimed in his 2001 inaugural address as president of Harvard, adding that “it is all too common and all too acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” This is Snow for the DNA age, complete with a frosty reception from the faculty.
Reall the full article in New York Times, Our Two Cultures
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