The two cultures is a paper about the growing divide between the humanities and the scientists, as seen by C.P. Snow, a Novelist and Chemist.
He expands on his idea that there are now two cultures with mutually
unintelligible ideas: A good many times I have been present at gatherings of
people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought
highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing
their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have
been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe
the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also
negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent
of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?[6] I now believe that if I
had asked an even simpler question – such as, What do you mean by mass,
or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you
read? – not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt
that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern
physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western
world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors
would have had.
This can even lead to strife: The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the
scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition. On the
other hand, the scientists believe that the literary intellectuals are
totally lacking in foresight, peculiarly unconcerned with their brother
men, in a deep sense anti-intellectual, anxious to restrict both art and
thought to the existential moment.
Snow concludes that this requires bridging between the two cultures:
There is only one way out of all this: it is, of
course, by rethinking our education. In this country, for the two
reasons I have given, that is more difficult than in any other. Nearly
everyone will agree that our school education is too specialised. But
nearly everyone feels that it is outside the will of man to alter it.
Other countries are as dissatisfied with their education as we are, but
are not so resigned.