| The Two Cultures |
| Thursday, February 2, 2006 [10:16 am] |
by C.P. Snow
This is the text of Snow's 1959 Rede lecture at Cambridge. The lecture discusses the division between the cultures of applied science and the so-called "literary intellectuals." Snow points out, for example, that the average engineer has never read Dickens, while the average literature scholar is not familiar with the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Snow's thesis: this division and the resulting lack of cross-culture communication are enormously harmful to society, especially since science is playing a more and more important role (thanks to the industrial revolution and now, according to Snow, the scientific revolution).
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