Baron C.P. SnowDied 1 Jul 1980 at age 74 (born 15 Oct 1905). Baron Charles Percy Snow was an English physicist, novelist and government administrator who had an active, varied career. In his controversial 1959 Rede Lecture called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, he claimed there were two cultures—the literary intellectuals and the scientists—who didn't understand each other and didn't trust each other. The split was not new; Snow noted that in the 1930s, literary theorists had begun to use the word “intellectual”to refer only to themselves. He illustrated this gap by asking a group of literary intellectuals to tell him about the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which he called the scientific equivalent of “Have you read a work of Shakespeare?”Since then, debate about this polarization has continued. |
