The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution

Abstract

Revolution. The 1959 Rede Lecture. By C. P. Snow. Price, $1.75. Pp. 58, with notes. Cambridge University Press, 32 E. 57th St., New York, 1960. Also available in paperback edition, price, $1.25. Last year's Rede Lecture at Cambridge C. P. Snow is now available in a slim, thoughtful, and disturbing volume entitled The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution. It runs a mere 58 pages of direct, insistent, pellucid prose and can be read in one hour. Since it takes so little time to courageously tackle problems vital to scientists, and since it is modestly priced, this unimposing book may well be the greatest literary bargain of an inflated publishing age. The two cultures in the title are the modern culture of the scientific intellectual and the traditional culture of the literary intellectual. With a foot in each cultural camp, C. P. Snow comes uniquely armed to the fray. He states his own qualifications : by training was a scientist; vocation was a writer. More specifically, Charles Percy Snow, the scientist, won his M. A. in physics in 1928, after taking first honors in chemistry at Leicester University. He then became a research fellow at Christ College, Cambridge. During the war, he was charged with the proper placement of English scien¬ tists the Ministry of Labor. For the last thirteen years, he has directed English Electric, Britain's largest electrical firm. On the literary side of the ledger, C. P. Snow is the famous author of a projected cycle of eleven novels known as Strangers and Brothers. His most widely read book is probably The Masters, number four in the cycle; while his latest novel, The Affair, is number eight. The series deals with the machinations in the upper-middle-class English world of education, government, and science. In effect, Snow seems set upon the commendable task of making the other practical scientists as popular as the psychia¬ trist in today's literary market. When such an awesomely equipped spokesman says, I believe the intellectual life of the whole of western society is in¬ creasingly being split into polar groups and there is the a gulf of mutual incomprehension that is doing great harm, it behooves us to listen. Snow's idea that scientists comprise a unified culture requires amplification. Cer¬ tainly, the gulf between the different sciences is often as great as that between the scientists and the literati. Attendance at a meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology will suffice to demon¬ strate what a Tower of Babel the natural sciences, in all their subdivisions, can create among themselves. In the field of medicine. the scientific split is manifest in the faltering dialogue between the research academicians and the private practitioners. In spite of these intragroup differences, scientists share attitudes, common standards and patterns of behavior, common approaches and assumptions. ... In their working, and in much of their emotional life, their atti¬ tudes are closer to other scientists than to non-scientists. .