Charles Percy Snow (1905-1980) was a well known British physicist who
also tried his hand as an author of novels (Strangers and Brothers). "By
training I was a scientist, by vocation I was a writer." - The phrase 'The two cultures' Lord
Snow first used in his 1959 Rede Lecture at Cambridge. It refers to the tribal
gulf that exists between the scientists and engineers on the one hand and the
'educated and art-loving' but scientifically innocent on the other.
To each of these two cultures applies: "As with
the tone-deaf, they don't know what they miss."
"Once or twice I have been provoked and have
asked the [art-loving] 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 about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?"
"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 majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as
much insight into science as their neolithic ancestors would have had."
(C.P. Snow:
The Two Cultures, 1959)