American Scientist

Almost 50 years ago, the scientist and novelist Charles Percy Snow delivered a lecture at the University of Cambridge in which he described a problematic situation that he termed "the two cultures." According to C. P. Snow, as he came to be most commonly known, it was the circumstances of his involvement in both the physics and the writing communities, mostly in Britain, that gave him an unusually diverse perspective on intellectual life at mid-century. Although he noted that members of the two groups that he moved among had similar social origins, possessed comparable intelligence and earned about the same amount of money, they barely communicated with each other. Snow observed that their "intellectual, moral and psychological climates had so little in common" that they may as well have come from different parts of the world. He feared that "the intellectual life of the whole of western society [was] increasingly being split into two polar groups"—epitomized by physical scientists and "literary intellectuals."