Two Culturei

The phrase two cultures refers to a worldview difference between the humanities and the natural sciences that has been remarked on at least since the 17th century but was named as such by the British physicist-novelist C. P. Snow in his 1959 Cambridge Rede Lecture, titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” The exact nature of that difference has shifted over time, and nowadays it is perhaps most visibly felt in the so-called science wars. Many of the educational and media-based initiatives that have been spawned over the past quarter-century in the name of “public understanding of science” and “science communication” may be seen as trying to bridge this most recent version of the two cultures problem.

A two cultures problem of the arts versus ...