Hi Linda, I suspect that what Snow said has an element of truth in it. As quoted here it looks false, as all absolute statements can. I have noticed that the American education system at the higher levels seems to provide for a more general education before specialising. The Australian can specialize very early and so researchers can be very young by comparison. The British has traditionally been very thorough in grounding and they did try for a technical education a long time ago due to industrial demands. If you read "Eminent Victorians" or the life around Cambridge Science from say 1900 to 1950 you can see the kind of atmosphere that Snow was exposed to. From my experience the divide is very sharp, I could never talk to maths or science friends about poetry or history or the humanities. To them that was a foreign country or worse. "What use are words?" one said. "What can you prove with just words?" - (he was an applied mathematician) Those of my friends who were humanities often had no idea about the sciences. They usually didn't even know Newton's laws. There are lawyers in Australia who don't understand simple force diagrams. Doctor don't understand maths. A lot has to do with our education system that streams arts/humanities and sciences around year ten. They do insist on some of each in year twelve but it doesn't work very well. Perhaps more than that is the distrust of thought, perhaps the "Tall Poppy" syndrome already mentioned. These are all specific examples and generalized but exceptions are unusual. There are those who have some familiarity with both cultures here but almost never in depth, for each.
Snow was trying to say that the quality of education in the world was on the decline.
"A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, the law of entropy. 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?'"
His claim was that this breakdown in communication is a major hinderance to solving the world's problems.
Perhaps your love [space shuttle incidents] is also a little mischievous? The best laid plans of mice and men? I am in two minds about these things. Most of the time I seem to be technical but as I get older I get warmer and see the other side more often.
I like that you can virtually feel that ineffable beauty. There is a post here on THINQon where someone describes feeling something akin to that during the progress of a morning as the sun comes up. Unfortunately I can't find it. But each stage of the day had a specific, subtle feeling attached to it. It seemed to me that feeling was what made one feel truly alive. I remember Wilde telling Douglas "You came to me to learn the Pleasures of Life and the Pleasures of Art. Perhaps I am chosen to teach you something much more wonderful, the meaning of Sorrow, and its beauty." So what you said reminded me of that. Thank you for telling me how you find things, it finds a resonance in me and there is value in reminding. It is a comfort.
That relates to my point earlier - those who get lost or go down a weird path seem to have lost part of that connection or feeling of being plugged into life. If they saw it or it was shown to them they may even suspect it. (as it is not "rational")
For my part, from a science point of view when I think of infinity, for instance, I don't think of an infinite temporal duration or even the so-called timelessness in the moment. I think of Cantor and the romance of his imagination where he considered how to actually define infinity and wrote to Bertrand Russell about it all. His letters to Russell (in Russell's Autobiography) are very moving and human and when he describes his mathematical and philosophical difficulties one is with him all the way. Of course, those of us learned in this know where it is all going and what will come in time, such as the hierarchy of infinities (there are infinitely many more infinite numbers than the reals), Cantor dust and all kinds of things that are very beautiful. So here you have an example of something fully analysable but has the beauty of poetry. Just because it's science doesn't mean it can't have that kind of beauty and wonder one finds in poetry. There are examples of this from all over science but scientists don't always appreciate that.
David Hilbert wrote: "No one shall expel us from the Paradise that Cantor has created." Wittgenstein for one didn't like it (his objections seemed mostly technical and flawed)
Set theory and infinity, both of which Cantor created was counter-intutive and shocking, especially the paradoxes.
I guess it is here in this space that to fully appreciate all this one does need the confluence of the two cultures; a single mind versed(!) in appreciating both in all its beauty. I hope this enlarges your view of that world as you tried to do so for mine, in your way.
Books Discussed
