two cultures essay

September 1, 2009

An Update on C. P. Snow's "Two Cultures"

A new column that examines the intersection between science and society provides an update on the historic essay

By Lawrence M. Krauss

Earlier this summer marked the 50th anniversary of C. P. Snow’s famous “Two Cultures” essay, in which he lamented the great cultural divide that separates two great areas of human intellectual activity, “science” and “the arts.” Snow argued that practitioners in both areas should build bridges, to further the progress of human knowledge and to benefit society.

Alas, Snow’s vision has gone unrealized. Instead literary agent John Brockman has posited a “third culture,” of scientists who communicate directly with the public about their work in media such as books without the intervening assistance of literary types. At the same time, many of those in the humanities, arts and politics remain content living within the walls of scientific illiteracy.

Good reasons exist for this phenomenon. In the first place, while we bemoan the lack of good science teaching in our public schools (the vast majority of middle school physical science and math teachers, for example, do not have a science degree), scientific illiteracy is not a major impediment to success in business, politics and the arts. At the university level, science is too often seen as something needed merely to fulfill a requirement and then to be dispensed with. To be fair, the same is often the case for humanities courses for science and engineering majors, but the big difference is that these students cannot help but be bombarded by literature, music and art elsewhere as a part of the pop culture that permeates daily life. And what’s more, individuals often proudly proclaim that science isn’t their thing, almost as a badge of honor to indicate their cultural bent.

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There is another factor, one that was on display at the World Science Festival in New York City this summer, which helps to undermine the role of science in society. Amid events on the cosmos, modern biology, quantum mechanics and other areas at the forefront of science, I participated in a panel discussion on science, faith and religion.

Why would such an event be a part of a science festival? We accord a special place to religion, in part thanks to groups such as the Templeton Foundation, which has spent millions annually raising the profile of “big questions,” which tend to suggest that science and religious belief are somehow related and should be treated as equals.

The problem is, they are not. Ultimately, science is at best only consistent with a God that does not directly intervene in the daily operations of the cosmos, certainly not the personal and ancient gods associated with the world’s great religions. Even though, as physicist Steven Weinberg has emphasized, most people who call themselves religious tend to adhere to only those bits and pieces from scripture that appeal to them, by according undue respect for ancient religious beliefs in general, we nonetheless are suggesting that they are on par with conclusions that have been drawn from centuries of rational empirical investigation. Snow hoped for a world that is quite different from how we live today, where indifference to science has, through religious fundamentalism, sometimes morphed into open hostility about concepts such as evolution and the big bang.

Snow did not rail against religion, but ignorance. As the moderator in my panel finally understood after an hour of discussion, the only vague notions of God that may be compatible with science ensure that God is essentially irrelevant to both our understanding of nature and our actions based on it. Until we are willing to accept the world the way it is, without miracles that all empirical evidence argues against, without myths that distort our comprehension of nature, we are unlikely to bridge the divide between science and culture and, more important, we are unlikely to be fully ready to address the urgent technical challenges facing humanity.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "C. P. Snow in New York."

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By Peter Dizikes

• March 19, 2009

Few literary phrases have had as enduring an after­life as “the two cultures,” coined by C. P. Snow to describe what he saw as a dangerous schism between science and literary life. Yet few people actually seem to read Snow’s book bearing that title. Why bother when its main point appears so evident?

It was 50 years ago this May that Snow, an English physicist, civil servant and novelist, delivered a lecture at Cambridge called “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” which was later published in book form. Snow’s famous lament was that “the intellectual life of the whole of Western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups,” consisting of scientists on the one hand and literary scholars on the other. Snow largely blamed literary types for this “gulf of mutual incomprehension.” These intellectuals, Snow asserted, were shamefully unembarrassed about not grasping, say, the second law of thermodynamics — even though asking if someone knows it, he writes, “is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

In the half-century since, “the two cultures” has become a “bumper-sticker phrase,” as NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, said in a 2007 speech. (Naturally, as a scientist, Griffin also declared that Snow had hit on an “essential truth.”) And Snow has certainly been enlisted in some unlikely causes. Writing in Newsweek in 1998, Robert Samuelson warned that our inability to take the Y2K computer bug more seriously “may be the ultimate vindication” of Snow’s thesis. (It wasn’t.) Some prominent voices in academia have also refashioned his complaint. “We live in a society, and dare I say a university, where few would admit — and none would admit proudly — to not having read any plays by Shakespeare,” Lawrence Summers proclaimed in his 2001 inaugural address as president of Harvard, adding that “it is all too common and all too acceptable not to know a gene from a chromosome.” This is Snow for the DNA age, complete with a frosty reception from the faculty.

There is nothing wrong with referring to Snow’s idea, of course. His view that education should not be too specialized remains broadly persuasive. But it is misleading to imagine Snow as the eagle-eyed anthropologist of a fractured intelligentsia, rather than an evangelist of our technological future. The deeper point of “The Two Cultures” is not that we have two cultures. It is that science, above all, will keep us prosperous and secure. Snow’s expression of this optimism is dated, yet his thoughts about progress are more relevant today than his cultural typologies.

After all, Snow’s descriptions of the two cultures are not exactly subtle. Scientists, he asserts, have “the future in their bones,” while “the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” Scientists, he adds, are morally “the soundest group of intellectuals we have,” while literary ethics are more suspect. Literary culture has “temporary periods” of moral failure, he argues, quoting a scientist friend who mentions the fascist proclivities of Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats and Wyndham Lewis, and asks, “Didn’t the influence of all they represent bring Auschwitz that much nearer?” While Snow says those examples are “not to be taken as representative of all writers,” the implication of his partial defense is clear.

Snow’s essay provoked a roaring, ad hominem response from the Cambridge critic F. R. Leavis — who called Snow “intellectually as undistinguished as it is possible to be” — and a more measured one from Lionel Trilling, who nonetheless thought Snow had produced “a book which is mistaken in a very large way indeed.” Snow’s cultural tribalism, Trilling argued, impaired the “possibility of rational discourse.”

Today, others believe science now addresses the human condition in ways Snow did not anticipate. For the past two decades, the editor and agent John Brockman has promoted the notion of a “third culture” to describe scientists — notably evolutionary biologists, psychologists and neuroscientists — who are “rendering visible the deeper meanings in our lives” and superseding literary artists in their ability to “shape the thoughts of their generation.” Snow himself suggested in the 1960s that social scientists could form a “third culture.”

So why did Snow think the supposed gulf between the two cultures was such a problem? Because, he argues in the latter half of his essay, it leads many capable minds to ignore science as a vocation, which prevents us from solving the world’s “main issue,” the wealth gap caused by industrialization, which threatens global stability. “This disparity between the rich and the poor has been noticed . . . most acutely and not unnaturally, by the poor,” Snow explains, adding: “It won’t last for long. Whatever else in the world we know survives to the year 2000, that won’t.” (For some reason, Y2K predictions and Snow did not mix well.) Thus Snow, whose service in World War II involved giving scientists overseas assignments, recommends dispatching a corps of technologists to industrialize the third world.

This brings “The Two Cultures” to its ultimate concern, which has less to do with intellectual life than with geopolitics. If the democracies don’t modernize undeveloped countries, Snow argues, “the Communist countries will,” leaving the West “an enclave in a different world.” Only by erasing the gap between the two cultures can we ensure wealth and self-government, he writes, adding, “We have very little time.”

Some of this sounds familiar; for decades we have regarded science as crucial to global competitiveness, an idea invoked as recently as in Barack Obama’s campaign. But in other ways “The Two Cultures” remains irretrievably a cold war document. The path to industrialization that Snow envisions follows W. W. Rostow’s “take-off into sustained growth,” part of 1950s modernization theory holding that all countries could follow the same trajectory of development. The invocation of popular revolution is similarly date-stamped in the era of decolonization, as is the untroubled embrace of ­government-dictated growth. “The scale of the operation is such that it would have to be a national one,” Snow writes. “Private industry, even the biggest private industry, can’t touch it, and in no sense is it a fair business risk.”

This is, I think, why Snow’s diagnosis remains popular while his remedy is ignored. We have spent recent decades convincing ourselves that technological progress occurs in unpredictable entrepreneurial floods, allowing us to surf the waves of creative destruction. In this light, a fussy British technocrat touting a massive government aid project appears distinctly uncool.

Yet “The Two Cultures” actually embodies one of the deepest tensions in our ideas about progress. Snow, too, wants to believe the sheer force of science cannot be restrained, that it will change the world — for the better — without a heavy guiding hand. The Industrial Revolution, he writes, occurred “without anyone,” including intellectuals, “noticing what was happening.” But at the same time, he argues that 20th-century progress was being stymied by the indifference of poets and novelists. That’s why he wrote “The Two Cultures.” So which is it? Is science an irrepressible agent of change, or does it need top-down direction?

This question is the aspect of “The Two Cultures” that speaks most directly to us today. Your answer — and many different ones are possible — probably determines how widely and deeply you think we need to spread scientific knowledge. Do we need to produce more scientists and engineers to fight climate change? How should they be deployed? Do we need broader public understanding of the issue to support governmental action? Or do we need something else?

Snow’s own version of this call for action, I believe, finally undercuts his claims. “The Two Cultures” initially asserts the moral distinctiveness of scientists, but ends with a plea for enlisting science to halt the spread of Communism — a concern that was hardly limited to those with a scientific habit of mind. The separateness of his two cultures is a very slippery thing. For all the book’s continuing interest, we should spend less time merely citing “The Two Cultures,” and more time genuinely reconsidering it.

Peter Dizikes is a science journalist based in Boston.

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His lecture, subsequently published in a book called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , argued that ‘the intellectual life of the whole of western society’ was divided into two quite separate parts – namely, the sciences and the humanities – and that the two kinds of academic pursuit were separated by an ever-deepening gulf of incomprehension, dislike and mistrust. The arts and humanities – including subjects as diverse as history, anthropology, music or fine art – Snow grouped under the umbrella of ‘traditional culture’. He argued that the backward-looking, change-averse, conservative British society in which he lived placed too much emphasis and prestige upon these subjects, whose relevance and worth was waning.

By contrast, too little store was set by the scientific knowledge that had helped Britain win the Second World War and rebuild its economic prosperity in the years that followed. Snow rebuked partisans of the ‘traditional culture’ (that is, writers, artists, musicians, historians and the like) for, as he saw it, continuing to assert their superiority ever more fiercely in the face of palpable, ubiquitous decay: ‘The traditional culture,’ Snow asserted, ‘which is, of course, mainly literary, is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining – standing on its precarious dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrine intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means, too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it’. Among the literati of his generation, Snow diagnosed a pervasive, unjustified snobbery about the intellectual achievements of scientists. His argument is perhaps best summarised in a frequently-quoted passage from his speech:

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 response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is 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 great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neo-lithic ancestors would have had.

As you’ve perhaps guessed by now, Snow’s anecdotal and undeniably rather crude argument falls heavily on the side of ‘men of science’ (the women, presumably, were all too busy counting their doilies and trying to get Brussels sprouts to absorb huge quantities of water to care much about the life of the mind). The scientist-cum-writer paints a vibrantly utopian, if rather vague and facile, picture of scientific culture. In opposition to its artistic counterpart, the republic of science is ‘expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash’. In fact, it is the lack of correspondence between the two branches of knowledge – or more specifically, the refusal of the ‘traditionals’ to cede authority and respect to their dynamic, progress-loving colleagues – that Snow finds to blame for all the world’s main problems: the threat of nuclear war, overpopulation, and the gap between rich and poor. Now, if all this seems like a bit of a muddle, that’s because it is. It’s a bit ungenerous to engage with Snow nearly sixty years after he first delivered the speech, but I’m going to anyway, partly because of the huge success and influence he enjoyed off the back of it (on which, more later), and partly because even if I’d been alive back then, I’d have been too busy cultivating marriageable attributes even to be accounted for in his argument – let alone to dispute it.

A not-especially-picky reader of The Two Cultures might observe that the persistent threat of nuclear war that darkened the second half of the last century, far from being precipitated by people in jumpers declining Latin verbs and reading the works of Milton, was actually very much a direct result of ‘impatient, intolerant, creative’ scientific culture. Another reader might concentrate their critical energies elsewhere, and remark that, even back in the fifties, there wasn’t a huge amount of originality in the observation that many bookish people can’t get their heads round calculus, while lots of chemists balk at the thought of self-expression through watercolour painting. Another might question the reliability of a diagnosis of the intellectual life of the western world whose sole evidence seems to be that the man making it was ‘by education a scientist, by calling a writer, at one time moving between groups of scientists and writers in the same evening’. Despite all its (to my mind, glaring) flaws, though, Snow’s speech was remarkably well-received: it was published as a book in a number of months, and continues to be taught as a staple of many philosophy and sociology courses to this day. Perhaps the biggest testament to Snow’s standing, and confirmation in a role of sage and social commentator, was that in the early 60s, the British prime minister Harold Wilson invited him to become a minister in the newly created Ministry of Technology – despite the fact that Snow had never held any elected office or other political position. Snow had very much hit the big time.

But if everything at this point seemed fairly unquestioningly rosy, there was one person at least whose nose Snow had really knocked out of joint: the Cambridge literary and social critic FR Leavis. In 1962, Leavis delivered a lecture entitled ‘The Significance of CP Snow’ to assembled fellows, students and members of the public in Downing College, Cambridge. The lecture was so viciously personal, so sarcastically dismissive, and so unrelentingly withering that its author would be angrily attacked in the pages of national newspapers for weeks to come. Now, the ostensible point of Leavis’s speech was twofold: first, to challenge Snow’s vision of ‘two cultures’, and second, to criticise the society that had conferred such status and respect on Snow himself. As Stefan Collini, a recent editor of Leavis’s speech, sums it up: ‘(Leavis’s) real target was the dynamics of reputation and public debate – the ways in which certain figures are consecrated as bearers of cultural authority’. But it is impossible to read the speech without getting the distinct sense that Leavis’s real issue, despite all his protestations to the contrary, was with Snow himself.

The speech opens in the devastatingly contemptuous tone that will pervade it: “If confidence in oneself as a master-mind, qualified by capacity, insight and knowledge to pronounce authoritatively on the frightening problems of our civilisation, is genius, then there can be no doubt about Sir Charles Snow’s.” Leavis’s target is Snow’s intellectual status, his right to pronounce on public and social issues, and this he attacks in varying shades of sarcasm throughout: from the mocking “Of course, anyone who offers to speak with inwardness and authority on both science and literature will be conscious of more than ordinary powers…” to the more straightforward “Snow is in fact portentously ignorant”; “Snow expresses complacently a complete ignorance”, and “he is as intellectually undistinguished as it is possible to be”. Leavis nowhere sugars the pill, dismissing his opponent’s literary creations, “Snow is, of course, a – no, I can’t say that; he isn’t; Snow thinks of himself as a novelist” and observing that his lecture was totally void of all the scientific insight its author claimed to possess: “all we get is a show of knowledgeableness”. Though it’d certainly be more fun to fill the rest of this article with Leavis’s catalogue of insults, and the retorts that Snow published in newspaper articles and books over the years to come, I must now (reluctantly) turn to the question with which I opened: where are we today? I’d like to structure my observations around Snow’s two main points: that there existed a gulf of misunderstanding between the sciences and humanities, and that this presented a barrier to addressing the world’s problems. Next, I’ll turn to some of the points Leavis made in his reply.

I must first confess that I don’t know the first law of thermodynamics. I don’t even want to know what thermodynamics is – something to do with joules and combustion temperatures and atoms, I imagine, so complex and confusing that trying to understand it would send me into a state of mental stupefaction from which it would be impossible, perhaps ever, to recover. But I do know most of the basic rules of modern technology: that coffee and the keyboard of a MacBook Pro are natural enemies, for example; and how to save documents to Dropbox; and that the answers to all technological problems, no matter how complex, can be found by Googling the error number. The terms of the divide Snow perceived in intellectual culture have changed in ways too numerous to mention: it’s probably still true that many artsy folk are naturally mistrustful of, and willfully uneducated about, all things scientific (and scientific knowledge becomes more specialised and impenetrable every time something new is discovered or invented, which seems to be roughly about every four seconds), but those same artsy folk now own digital cameras and fancy mobile phones, and use Photoshop and Google Maps. The average person of our generation is actually astonishingly scientifically-savvy (if you don’t believe me, simply observe what happens when your dad thinks it’s a good idea to buy your grandmother an iPad for Christmas, and then spends an hour a night over the subsequent six months trying to teach her to turn it on. My granny’s iPad now sits proudly on a table in her living room, and is vigorously polished once a week, but remains decidedly off). What’s more, if the humanities ever did enjoy a position at the top of a putative hierarchy of subjects, their day is definitively over: I am, of course, generalising, but in my circle of friends the engineers, mathematicians, physicists and IT-graduates found brilliant, incredibly well-paid jobs after they left university, while we English grads were faced with the prospect of fighting a thousand other applicants for a six-week unpaid internship at a home appliances catalogue in Slough. If there ever was a time when the humanities were more prestigious or dominant than the sciences, that day has waned.

For all its nastiness and bile, I must say that, half a century on, I find Leavis’s lecture more compelling and resonant. In a week in which Emma Watson, a hitherto totally un-vocal, unopinionated and let’s face it, pretty drippy actress, has been crowned high priestess of feminism and delivered an entirely unremarkable, facile and ghost-written speech to the UN to universal acclaim, Leavis’s observation that our society unfairly endows certain individuals, seemingly almost at random, with the necessary gravitas to pronounce on social and ethical issues seems more true than ever. Of course, everyone should have the right to speak out about issues close to their hearts – and on one level, it’s wonderful that Watson can finally put to rights those people who told her she was bossy for wanting to direct plays as a child rather than act in them (not that that story sounds totally made up or anything). And what’s more, it’s obviously great that the world is sitting up and taking notice of a young voice – but I can’t shake the feeling that we are doing so mainly because the voice is that of a Hollywood starlet. Celebrities promoting a cause are rarely very original or convincing: indeed, I find watching whichever royal family member, sports star or actor the BBC have convinced to get suited up and appear on Question Time to discuss Issues Of Weight to be positively painful. Joey Barton’s opinions on immigration are almost certain to be ill-thought-out, vague, and probably offensive to boot (they were). Should we not be turning to experts, or at least to people who have a real and proven passion, for insight into these issues? Yes – I personally want to hear about feminism from a wizened, wrinkled old buzzard-lady with spectacles and whiskers, who’s spent at least thirty years in the cellars of some library reading about gender theory and building tiny shrines to Mary Wollstonecraft and Emily Davies. And I’m sure Leavis would have liked that too.

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• Published: 06 May 2009

Dissecting The Two Cultures

• Martin Kemp 1  

Nature volume  459 ,  pages 32–33 ( 2009 ) Cite this article

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Fifty years ago today, Charles Percy Snow argued in an influential lecture that the failure of science and the humanities to converse, and the lack of scientists in positions of power, was disastrous for society. In the first of three essays marking this anniversary, Martin Kemp contends that the real enemy of understanding is not these 'Two Cultures' but specialization in all disciplines.

“The Two Cultures” is a phrase — like “the corridors of power” — that has seeped into common usage. Divorced from their original context, such phrases tend to become a form of negligent shorthand that allows us to avoid precise thinking. Both were coined by the same author, Charles Percy Snow — one-time physicist, prolific novelist and political climber.

'The Two Cultures' was the title of Snow's hugely influential Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge, UK, on 7 May 1959. One culture was science; the other was the humanities, as represented by “literary intellectuals”. Snow decried what he saw as the total inability of highly educated people to cross a deep rift of mutual incomprehension.

Snow's cultural diagnosis is encapsulated in his famous challenge: “Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company [of 'intellectuals'] 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?'”

Snow's early career as a research scientist had been aborted in the mid-1930s, when he became disillusioned by having to acknowledge that some of his experimental work on vitamin A — published in Nature with Philip Bowden — did not stand up to scientific scrutiny. He subsequently flourished as a novelist, most notably with his 'Strangers and Brothers' series, centered incestuously in the hermetic hothouse of Cambridge academic politics.

He also climbed the ladder of official posts, rising to become parliamentary secretary to the Minister of Technology (1964–1966) in the House of Lords as Baron Snow. He was a major shaper of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's 1963 vision of the “white heat of the technological revolution”, and commanded a wide audience both nationally and internationally.

Snow saw applied science as holding the key to a humane future, in terms of a rational understanding of nature but also as the only force that could tackle the problems of well-being in developed and developing countries. Yet 'Luddites' from the humanities still prevailed in the 'corridors of power' — as Snow titled his 1964 novel.

Fuelling the fire

In almost all countries, a gulf of understanding has opened up by the time students enter university.

In 1960, as a student newly arrived at the University of Cambridge, I inadvertently encountered the person who was to reignite the controversy sparked by Snow. I saw a haggard figure, shambling across the lawns at Downing College. He was draped in an elderly coat intended for a more ample frame. His leathery neck emerged from a shirt with no tie. Not knowing who he was, I gave him a wide berth, wary of being asked for money.

It transpired that this was the legendary don of English literature and fiery literary critic, Frank R. Leavis. In 1962 Leavis subjected Snow and 'The Two Cultures' to a stinging assault, described not unfairly by philosopher Simon Critchley as “a vicious ad hominem attack”. Leavis delivered his criticism in the Richmond Lecture that commemorated the last of his 30 years of teaching at Downing College.

Despite his international reputation, Leavis remained, and relished remaining, an outsider in official university circles. Snow, by contrast, had become a heavyweight of the establishment. The cover of the slim volume of Snow's lecture in the university book shop portrayed a well-nourished bulldog of a man in contemplative mode, with dark jacket and neat tie. An obvious insider, in contrast to Leavis the outsider.

Leavis despised Snow's literary works: “as a novelist he doesn't exist; he doesn't begin to exist. He can't be said to know what a novel is.” Leavis also dismissed Snow's authority as a cultural guru, regarding him as a mindless sign of the times: “he is a portent in that, being in himself negligible, he has become for a vast public on both sides of the Atlantic a master-mind and a sage... It is ridiculous to credit him with any capacity for serious thinking about the problems on which he offers to advise the world.”

Leavis acclaimed great literature as the true guardian of human values: “the judgments the literary critic is concerned with are judgments about life. What the critical discipline is concerned with is relevance and precision in making and developing them.” He sided with Blaise Pascal, the French seventeenth-century mathematician and theologian, who declared in his Pensées that “physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the physical sciences.”

For Leavis, science — and the technological society it was spawning — was devoid of humane values. He insisted on the need for other kinds of concern, “entailing forethought, action and provision about the human future”. To speak of human well-being only “in terms of productivity, material standards of living, hygienic and technological progress” was morally bankrupt. Leavis was witnessing with horror what he saw as the beginning of a takeover by dreaded technocrats, the apocalyptic results of which had been portrayed by George Orwell in his 1949 novel Nineteen Eighty-Four .

False divide

Viewed historically, Snow's way of setting up the debate about the two cultures was founded on a false comparison between knowledge of Shakespeare and thermodynamics. The roots of this mistaken comparison were laid when knowledge in all forms of learning started to become specialized and professionalized, reaching an apogee when disciplines were institutionalized in the nineteenth century. The establishment of societies was not limited to the sciences and technologies. We can set, for instance, the founding of the Royal College of Veterinary Surgeons in 1844 beside that of the Government School of Design (later to become the Royal College of Art) in 1837.

Since then, the general aspects of high culture have continued to engage professionals in the sciences and humanities to similar degrees. A 2006 study from University College London showed that scientists are only a little less likely to watch a Shakespeare play than their counterparts in the humanities. Specialized research in the humanities is another matter. All academic subjects have become 'laboratory' pursuits with respect to their specialized techniques and vocabularies. Snow's poser about the second law of thermodynamics would be better matched against a narrower question in literary studies, such as asking what is meant by deconstruction as practised by the philosopher Jacques Derrida.

On re-reading the Rede and Richmond lectures today, I am struck by how they are very much of their time. It is difficult to disentangle the personal animosity, the citing of anecdotal experiences and the academic politics from the real issues.

Perhaps the best statement of what was and remains at stake came in Snow's later essay 'The Two Cultures: A Second Look', first published in The Times Literary Supplement in 1963: “Persons educated with the greatest intensity we know can no longer communicate with each other on the plane of their major intellectual concern. This is serious for our creative, intellectual and, above all, our normal life. It is leading us to interpret the past wrongly, to misjudge the present, and to deny our hopes of the future. It is making it difficult or impossible for us to take good action.”

But we should also recall, above all in the light of current financial and ecological crises, Leavis's insistence on the inadequacy of defining human 'progress' in terms of the implementation of technologies that have been seen as delivering endless economic growth.

The issue does not involve two monolithic 'cultures' of science and humanities. It is about the narrow specialization of all disciplines and wider understanding. I wonder how many biologists could answer Snow's test question, especially in the light of modern physics. I suspect that most scholars in the humanities would fare little better with the Derrida test.

The problem is educational. There is certainly a division between 'sciences' and 'humanities', but the categories are too general to be useful in formulating any plan of action. It is the perceived need for intense specialization of any kind — in history or physics, in languages or biology — that needs to be tackled. Levels of early specialization vary across the world, but in almost all countries, a gulf of understanding has opened up by the time students enter university.

What is needed is an education that inculcates a broad mutual understanding of the nature of the various fields of research, so that we might recognize where their special competence and limitations lie. To paraphrase Christ from the Bible, it is a case of 'render unto science the things that are the sciences' and 'render unto humanities the things that are the humanities'. It is equally important not to render more to each than is warranted. The trick is to do this in the public arena, using well-informed judgement over what belongs and does not belong to each.

Snow's concern about the rift between science and the humanities is real and urgent. But so are Leavis's questions about the terms on which we can arrive at a humane definition of progress.

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The Two Cultures

C P Snow’s epochal essay published online for the first time.

By C P Snow

Melvyn Bragg’s new Radio 4 series, The Value of Culture (9am and 9:30pm every day this week), interrogates beliefs about the meaning of “culture” since the 19 th century. Each episode is framed around a high-profile fissure on the subject, having begun on Monday with Matthew Arnold and his argument that “Men of culture are the true apostles of equality”, which was met with fervent criticism from “Darwin’s Bulldog”, Thomas Huxley.

This morning Bragg discussed the life and work of C P Snow, whose famous thesis on the division of the two cultures we broadly delineate as the arts and sciences, was first published in essay form by the New Statesman in 1956. Snow, himself an esteemed chemist and fiction writer, lamented the “mutual incomprehension” which separated the scientific and “traditional” cultures – defining the latter as “mainly literary … behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining, spending too much energy on Alexandrine intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means”.

He continued, “Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated, but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.” This would be the scientific equivalent of “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”

Bragg considers the importance of anthropology in shaping canonical norms: “It’s fascinating, the contrast,” he told T he  Telegraph ’s Sameer Rahim on Monday . “You can’t say culture is just this narrow thing: culture is the way a tribe interacts, culture is habits, traditions, ways of believing and ways of dressing up.”

On Friday the series will end with a debate on the meaning and value of culture in the twenty-first century, recorded before a live audience at the Lit and Phil in Newcastle – a symbol, if ever there was one, of the question’s longevity. Clearly the 73-year-old broadcaster has a vested interest – his  South Bank Show and In Our Time have seen Bragg take a rigorously intelligible approach to a broad spectrum of topics from across the arts and sciences, hoping to spread a little of what Arnold terms “sweetness and light” to the “raw and unkindled masses”.

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When asked how far he thinks we have evolved since C P Snow first formulated his argument, Bragg replied:

I think we’ve liberated an awful lot of talent. Compared with when I was a boy, this country is far fresher, more vigorous and bolder. Two or three years ago I was listening to Radio 3 and a 16-year-old cellist was being interviewed. She said, “I play in a heavy metal band.” She wasn’t showing off.

Perhaps Snow was not alone in lamenting this incomprehension. In November 1956, a month after Snow published his essay, the American novelist and professor of biochemistry Isaac Asimov completed “The Last Question” – a short story which centres on the pressing reality of universal entropy: endgame of the Second Law. As humanity merges with the technology it has created, each generation repeats the question “How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?” only to receive the answer, “THERE IS AS YET INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.” After mankind has disappeared, the sum mental potential of its mental processes lives on in AC, a supercomputer which continues to “think” while the stars crumble, planets cool, and space and time cease to exist. Aeons have passed, and AC has finally discovered how to reverse the direction of entropy. But there is nobody to tell, mankind and the universe being dead. No matter. “LET THERE BE LIGHT!” AC says, “And there was light–”.

Philip Maughan

“It’s rather odd,” said G H Hardy, one afternoon in the early Thirties, “but when we hear about ‘intellectuals’ nowadays, it doesn’t include people like me and J J Thomson and Rutherford.” Hardy was the first mathematician of his generation, J J Thomson the first physicist of his; as for Rutherford, he was one of the greatest scientists who have ever lived. Some bright young literary person (I forget the exact context) putting them outside the enclosure reserved for intellectuals seemed to Hardy the best joke for some time. It does not seem quite such a good joke now. The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them, little but different kinds of incomprehension and dislike.

The traditional culture, which is, of course, mainly literary, is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly declining – standing on its precarious dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrine intricacies, occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique quite beyond its means, too much on the defensive to show any generous imagination to the forces which must inevitably reshape it. Whereas the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash. Neither culture knows the virtues of the other; often it seems they deliberately do not want to know. The resentment which the traditional culture feels for the scientific is shaded with fear; from the other side, the resentment is not shaded so much as brimming with irritation. When scientists are faced with an expression of the traditional culture, it tends (to borrow Mr William Cooper’s eloquent phrase) to make their feet ache.

It does not need saying that generalizations of this kind are bound to look silly at the edges. There are a good many scientists indistinguishable from literary persons, and vice versa. Even the stereotype generalizations about scientists are misleading without some sort of detail – e.g. the generalizations that scientists as a group stand on the political Left. This is only partly true. A very high proportion of engineers is almost as conservative as doctors; of pure scientists, the same would apply to chemists. It is only among physicists and biologists that one finds the Left in strength. If one compared the whole body of scientists with their opposite numbers of the traditional culture (writers, academics, and so on), the total result might be a few per cent more towards the Left wing, but not more than that. Nevertheless, as a first approximation, the scientific culture is real enough and so is its difference from the traditional. For anyone like myself, by education a scientist, by calling a writer, at one time moving between groups of scientists and writers in the same evening, the difference has seemed dramatic.

The first thing, impossible to miss, is that scientists are on the up and up; they have the strength of a social force behind them. If they are English, they share the experience common to us all – of being in a country sliding economically downhill – but in addition (and to many of them it seems psychologically more important) they belong to something more than a profession, to something more like a directing class of a new society. In a sense oddly divorced from politics, they are the new men. Even the staidest and most politically conservative of scientific veterans, lurking in dignity in their colleges, have some kind of link with the world to come. They do not hate it as their colleagues do; part of their mind is open to it; almost against their will, there is a residual glimmer of kinship there. The young English scientists may and do curse their luck; increasingly they fret about the rigidities of their universities, about the ossification of the traditional culture which, to the scientists, makes the universities cold and dead; they violently envy their Russian counterparts who have money and equipment without discernable limit, who have the whole field wide open. But still they stay pretty resilient: they are swept on by the same social force. Harwell and Winscale have just as much spirit as Los Alamos and Chalk River: the neat petty bourgeois houses, the tough and clever young, the crowds of children: they are symbols, frontier towns.

There is a touch of the frontier qualities, in fact, about the whole scientific culture. Its tone is, for example, steadily heterosexual. The difference in social manners between Harwell and Hampstead, or as far as that goes between Los Alamos and Greenwich village, would make an anthropologist blink. About the whole scientific culture, there is an absence – surprising to outsiders – of the feline and oblique. Sometimes it seems that scientists relish speaking the truth, especially when it is unpleasant. The climate of personal relations is singularly bracing, not to say harsh: it strikes bleakly on those unused to it who suddenly find that the scientists’ way of deciding on action is by a full-dress argument, with no regard for sensibilities and no holds barred. No body of people ever believed more in dialectic as the primary method of attaining sense; and if you want a picture of scientists in their off-moments it could be just one of a knock-about argument. Under the argument there glitter egotisms as rapacious as any of ours: but, unlike ours, the egotisms are driven by a common purpose.

How much of the traditional culture gets through to them? The answer is not simple. A good many scientists, including some of the most gifted, have the tastes of literary persons, read the same things, and read as much. Broadly, though, the infiltration is much less. History gets across to a certain extent, in particular social history: the sheer mechanics of living, how men ate, built, travelled, worked touches a good many scientific imaginations, and so they have fastened on such works as Trevelyan’s Social History , and Professor Gordon Childe’s books. Philosophy the scientific culture views with indifference, especially metaphysics. As Rutherford said cheerfully to Samuel Alexander: “When you think of all the years you’ve been talking about those things, Alexander, and what does it all add up to? Hot air , nothing but hot air .” A bit less exuberantly, that is what contemporary scientists would say. They regard it as a major intellectual virtue, to know what not to think about. They might touch their hats to linguistic analysis, as a relatively honourable way of wasting time; not so to existentialism.

The arts? The only one which is cultivated among scientists is music. It goes both wide and deep; there may possibly be a greater density of musical appreciation than in the traditional culture. In comparison, the graphic arts (except architecture) score little, and poetry not at all. Some novels work their way through, but not as a rule the novels which literary persons set most value on. The two cultures have so few points of contact that the diffusion of novels shows the same sort of delay, and exhibits the same oddities, as though they were getting into translation in a foreign country. It is only fairly recently, for instance, that Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh have become more than names. And, just as it is rather startling to find that in Italy Bruce Marshall is by a long shot the best-known British novelist, so it jolts one to hear scientists talking with attention of the works of Nevil Shute. In fact, there is a good reason for that: Mr Shute was himself a high-class engineer, and a book like No Highway is packed with technical stuff that is not only accurate but often original. Incidentally, there are benefits to be gained from listening to intelligent men, utterly removed from the literary scene and unconcerned as to who’s in and who’s out. One can pick up such a comment as a scientist once made, that it looked to him as though the current preoccupations of the New Criticism, the extreme concentration on a tiny passage, had made us curiously insensitive to the total flavour of the work, to its cumulative effects, to the epic qualities in literature. But, on the other side of the coin, one is just as likely to listen to three of the most massive intellects in Europe happily discussing the merits of The Wallet of Kai-Lung .

When you meet the younger rank-and-file of scientists, it often seems that they do not read at all. The prestige of the traditional culture is high enough for some of them to make a gallant shot at it. Oddly enough, the novelist whose name to them has become a token of esoteric literary excellence is that difficult highbrow Dickens. They approach him in a grim and dutiful spirit as though tackling Finnegan’s Wake , and feel a sense of achievement if they manage to read a book through. But most young technicians do not fly so high. When you ask them what they read – “As a married man,” one says, “I prefer the garden.” Another says: “I always  like just to use my books as tools.” (Difficult to resist speculating what kind of tool a book would make. A sort of hammer? A crude digging instrument?)

That, or something like it, is a measure of the incommunicability of the two cultures. On their side the scientists are losing a great deal. Some of that loss is inevitable: it must and would happen in any society at our technical level. But in this country we make it quite unnecessarily worse by our educational patterns. On the other side, how much does the tradition culture lost by the separation?

I am inclined to think, even more. Not only practically – we are familiar with those arguments by now – but also intellectually and morally. The intellectual loss is a little difficult to appraise. Most scientists would claim that you cannot comprehend the world unless you know the structure of science, in particular of physical science. In a sense, and a perfectly genuine sense, that is true. Not to have read War and Peace and La Cousine Bette and La Chartreuse de Parme is not to be educated; but so is not to have a glimmer of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Yet that case ought not to be pressed too far. It is more justifiable to say that those without any scientific understanding miss a whole body of experience: they are rather like the tone deaf, from whom all musical experience is cut off and who have to get on without it. The intellectual invasions of science are, however, penetratingly deeper. Psycho-analysis once looked like a deep invasion, but that was a false alarm; cybernetics may turn out to be the real thing, driving down into the problems of will and cause and motive. If so, those who do not understand the method will not understand the depths of their own cultures.

But the greatest enrichment the scientific culture could give us is – thought it does not originate like that – a moral one. Among scientists, deep-natured men know, as starkly as any men have known, that the individual human condition is tragic; for all its triumphs and joys, the essence of its loneliness and the end death. But what they will not admit is that, because the individual condition is tragic, therefore the social condition must be tragic, too. Because a man must die, that is no excuse for his dying before his time and after a servile life. The impulse behind the scientists drives them to limit the area of tragedy, to take nothing as tragic that can conceivably lie within men’s will. They have nothing but contempt for those representatives of the traditional culture who use a deep insight into man’s fate to obscure the social truth – or to do something prettier than obscure the truth, just to hang on to a few perks. Dostoevski sucking up to the Chancellor Pobedonotsev, who thought the only thing wrong with slavery was that there was not enough of it; the political decadence of the Avant garde of 1914, with Ezra Pound finishing up broadcasting for the Fascists; Claudel agreeing sanctimoniously with the Marshal about the virtue in others’ suffering; Faulkner giving sentimental reasons for treating Negroes as a different species. They are all symptoms of the deepest temptation of the clerks – which is to say: “Because man’s condition is tragic, everyone ought to stay in their place, with mine as it happens somewhere near the top.” From that particular temptation, made up of defeat, self-indulgence, and moral vanity, the scientific culture is almost totally immune. It is that kind of moral health of the scientists which, in the last few years, the rest of us have needed most; and of which, because the two culture scarcely touch, we have been most deprived.

6 October 1956

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Two Cultures

C.P. Snow Started It

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TwoCultures.net featires images from photographers and artists. Send your Two Cultures image.   Credit: Yoko Nekonomania | Flickr

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Multiple Views of Logic

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Interpreting Digital Media

Not wrong, just irrelevant, image and imagination, embracing complexity.

Cognitive complexity is a psychological characteristic or psychological variable that indicates how complex or simple is the frame and perceptual skill of a person.

Cognitive complexity is a notion introduced by James Bieri in 1955. Bieri later pursued an interest in English Romantic poetry and in 2005 published a two-volume biography of Shelley.

Describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics

--C.P. Snow

Snow's Polarities "Two polar groups: at one pole we have the literary intellectuals, at the other scientists, and as the most representative, the physical scientists. Between the two a gulf of mutual incomprehension."

Read snow's original paper.

New Statesman has published the full text of the C.P. Snow article published in 1956. "It is that kind of moral health of the scientists which, in the last few years, the rest of us have needed most; and of which, because the two cultures scarcely touch, we have been most deprived."

Third Space

Australian researchers proposed the "emergence of a 'third space' at the intersection of art and science in the public domain – a site of trans disciplinary engagement, inquiry and knowledge production that plays a vital role in the contemporary research landscape."

L. Muller, Bennett, J. Froggett, L., Bartlett, V. "Understanding Third Space:Evaluating Art-Science Collaboration" in Proceedings of ISEA 2015

Nature, Humans, Machines

"At TEDGlobal 2010, author Matt Ridley shows how, throughout history, the engine of human progress has been the meeting and mating of ideas to make new ideas. It's not important how clever individuals are, he says; what really matters is how smart the collective brain is."

"There are no secrets in science." --C.P. Snow

Aldous Huxley wrote Science and Literature in 1963.

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We are technologists who are also poets. Mark Underwood Leo Obrst

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The Two Cultures, by C. P. Snow

“By training I was a scientist,” remarks Sir Charles Snow at the beginning of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , “by vocation I was a writer. That was all. It was a piece of luck, if you like, that arose through coming from a poor home.” The author of this essay, which was delivered as the Rede Lecture last year at Cambridge University, is a distinguished scientist and scientific administrator in the British civil service. He is also the novelist C. P. Snow. In him the estrangement of the scientist from the literary intellectual—the “two cultures” of his title—seems never to have happened, and with casual irony Snow attributes this happy circumstance to accident: like many another Englishman he has located his destiny in his birth. There is, indeed, little question that Snow speaks with a singular kind of authority. No one else in England, or America, is able to command this mediate position or address himself to a widely dispersed yet highly educated audience with anything like his confidence and simplicity. Compared to him, someone like Robert Oppenheimer reminds one of homecoming day at Ethical Culture, an impression I found borne out in a recent admiring article in the Paris edition of the Herald Tribune describing Oppenheimer as an “American saint”—which in turn prompted me to recollect that, as George Orwell once observed, sainthood is something human beings ought to avoid.

C. P. snow is no saint. The directness and robustness with which he manages his authority constitute much of his charm, the charm of a mundane, serious, civilized man, invested with both official and unofficial prestige and power, addressing himself to a conflict and a crisis. The conflict has to do with the two cultures, scientific and intellectual, and the crisis with what he calls the Scientific Revolution, the application of advanced, systematic scientific techniques to industry. Snow regards these conditions as bearing powerfully on our relations both with the Soviet Union and the poorer, backward nations of the world. Unable to find much that is happening in either of the two cultures to relieve his sense of dissatisfaction and distress, he makes certain suggestions, mostly in respect to higher education, which are designed to set us on the way toward some solution of the conflict.

_____________

This little book has stirred up a considerable controversy in England, and Snow’s argument has been attacked and defended on a variety of grounds. Actually, he has two arguments to make, running alongside each other and converging at certain points, but essentially distinct. The one that concerns the two cultures has been the subject of the more animated discussion. It confronts head-on the fact that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly split into two polar groups.” At one pole are the literary intellectuals, who for Snow represent “the traditional culture”; at the other, the physical scientists with—what? Well, as he says, certain “common attitudes, common standards and patterns of behaviour, common approaches and assumptions. This goes surprisingly wide and deep. It cuts across other mental patterns, such as those of religion or politics or class.” This seems to shift the definition of culture toward its anthropological sense (C. P. Snow’s scientists might very well be Samoans), which isn’t the sense one normally intends in speaking about “the traditional culture.” However, the two groups undeniably exist, eyeing each other across “a gulf of mutual incomprehension,” feeling mutual “hostility and dislike,” sharing almost no common ground. The situation is deplorable, and in Snow’s view, dangerous and destructive.

Although he has much to say in criticism of both “cultures,” Snow in the end comes down rather firmly on the side of the scientists. And it is, I believe, in his description of the nature of the “cultures” that he can be seen to make a number of significant errors, in observation and in judgment. Scientists seem naturally to be men who “have the future in their bones,” he notes—a proposition which appears to be generally reasonable. But at the other pole—where the feelings of one group tend to “become the anti-feelings of the other”—the traditional culture “responds by wishing the future did not exist.” Without intending to split semantic hairs, I must say that I don’t really know what the statement means, especially since in a footnote Snow refers to George Orwell’s 1984 as “the strongest possible wish that the future should not exist” Not that one, to be sure, not the future represented in 1984 —in writing such a book one of Orwell’s impulses was to prevent, insofar as a novelist can undertake to do so, that future, to register his protest against its coming about. Snow seems to have forgotten that, as Thomas Mann once wrote, “Prophecies are sometimes made in order that they may not come to pass—as a spell, indeed, against their fulfillment.” No more does C. P. Snow wish for such a future, which is exactly why he wrote his own book. He is a man of solid and vigorous hopefulness, of large practical intelligence, and what disturbs him about something like 1984 , I think, is its quality of despair. But 1984 is also suffused with other emotions, one of them being a passion of honesty: to see the object as in itself it really is—or might become. It is, we remind ourselves, a work of literature, a novel; and as such, its relation to the future, its consequences in the practical life of society, have a different character than the work of the scientist or the statesman.

C. P. snow proceeds to the charge that “western intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the industrial revolution, much less accept it,” and he calls them “natural Luddites,” breakers of machines. The writing of men like Ruskin or Morris or D. H. Lawrence, he asserts, “were not in effect more than screams of horror. It is hard to think of a writer of high class who really stretched his imaginative sympathy, who could see at once the hideous back-streets, the smoking chimneys, the internal price—and also the prospects of life that were opening out for the poor, the intimations, up to now unknown except to the lucky, which were just coming within reach of the remaining 99 per cent of his brother men.” Snow believes he is requiring only that writers be disinterested, but in fact he is asking that they be abstract; if one succeeds in moving from a contemplation of “the hideous back-streets” to the “prospects of life . . . opening out for the poor,” the back-streets will tend to appear less hideous, less actual. It may be the virtue, as it certainly is the work, of men with primarily practical and political interests to think in this way, but it surely isn’t the virtue or the work of writers. Writers undertake to tell us what it is like to be alive at a certain moment in history, to feel and work and think (even of the future) in particular material, temporal, and spiritual circumstances. Insofar as they understand the human spirit more fully and subtly than any other class of men, it is because they regard it as inseparable from complex, immediate, concrete conditions. Snow mentions Thoreau as one of the writers who, faced with the prospect of the industrial revolution, let out “screams of horror” and little else. I myself have never been able to respond with much sympathy to Thoreau, though it is just the thin, abstract quality of his mind that seems to me to disqualify him from that “high class” of writers of which Snow speaks. But it was Thoreau who said (in Resistance to Civil Government ): “I came into this world not chiefly to make it a good place to live in, but to live in it, be it good or bad.” If this statement inclines to be overformulated, it does nevertheless seem to me far more suggestive and precise as a statement of the position and predicament of the intellectual, even in regard to his responsibility to the future of his society, than C. P. Snow’s representation.

According to Snow, only “Ibsen in his old age” understood the industrial revolution, saw the hope along with the horror (I presume he is referring to plays like The Master Builder ). But if one thinks of the kind of writer Snow has generally in mind, one thinks of Shelley, apostle of hope amid hideousness.

To suffer woes which Hope thinks infinite; To forgive wrongs darker than death or      night;    To defy Power, which seems omnipoten; To love, and bear; to hope till Hope creates From its own wreck the thing it contem-       plates. . . .

These are splendid sentiments, but only someone with Shelley’s precarious hold on the actual could have written such a passage. For him—among all our important poets—ideas tended to be more palpable than anything that came to him in the shape of concrete experience. I am simplifying somewhat, but the connection between Shelley’s intense, humane belief in an unrealized future and the abstractness of his relation to immediate experience cannot, I think, be denied.

Paradoxically, C. P. Snow’s novels are as little abstract as one could imagine. At their most interesting, as in The Masters , they are the work of a skillful, matter-of-fact intelligence, and they are most convincing when they represent the work of men in committees, the debates over tactics and positions, the pulling and tugging in a fight for power. But if they seem authentic in their descriptions of the professional life, their authenticity, I’m afraid, doesn’t extend to other, larger areas of experience.

Snow’s censure of the retrograde attitudes of the traditional culture is correlative with his defense of the “culture” of the scientists. He states what is common knowledge, that by and large the connections of contemporary scientists “with the traditional culture . . . [are] tenuous, nothing more than a formal touch of the cap,” and that their culture, although “in many ways an exacting and admirable one,” doesn’t contain much art—music being the single exception—and “of the books which to most literary persons are bread and butter, novels, history, poetry, plays, almost nothing at all.” As a result, “they are self-impoverished.” While they profess their interest “in the psychological or moral or social life,” they also believe that “the whole literature of the traditional culture doesn’t seem . . . relevant to those interests.” Of course, he adds, they are dead wrong. Having said this, he goes on to establish an equivalence between the illiteracy of the scientists and the unknowingness of literary persons about science. For him the ignorance of an intellectual about the Second Law of Thermodynamics is the “scientific equivalent” of having never read a work of Shakespeare’s.

Well, without offering to defend anyone’s ignorance, I am still not convinced that these are deficiencies of equal gravity. Snow here reiterates the formula he originally set down in calling the scientists and the literary intellectuals two cultures, implying a kind of parity, though the former, as I have noted, seems to me to be a culture only in an anthropological sense. Indeed, Snow has, I think, confused the distinction that exists between “culture” and “a culture” (a kind of error that Raymond Williams discusses in his valuable book, Culture and Society ), and it is partly because of such errors in discrimination that he doesn’t succeed in convincing the reader that a genuine, literate discourse between scientists and literary men is possible. 2 Moreover, his suggestion that the only remedy is to make education less specialized may have some relevance in England, but clearly does not apply to the situation in America, where this kind of specialization is delayed longer than it is in any other country, without affecting the radical estrangement of the two groups.

The second half of the book, in which Snow considers the “Scientific Revolution,” is written with much greater certitude and command, and I read this section, I must confess, in a kind of holy dread. He defines the scientific revolution as the first great change to have grown out of the industrial revolution, closely related to it, “but far more deeply scientific, far quicker, and probably far more prodigious in its result. This change comes from the application of real science to industry, no longer hit and miss, no longer the ideas of odd ‘inventors,’ but the real stuff.” He roughly dates it as having begun some thirty or forty years ago, “when atomic particles were first made industrial use of.” He says—and who can say he isn’t right—that in the West virtually no one outside the scientific community truly understands what this means, and what it means for the rest of the world. The Russians seem to, however, and one of the most interesting passages of the book consists of a comparison of scientific education in Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union. According to the latest figures, the USSR graduates each year 130,000 scientists and engineers; the United States, 65,000; the United Kingdom, 13,000. Furthermore, for some unaccountable reason, “the number of engineers graduating per year in the United States is declining fairly sharply,” though Snow believes we are more likely to awaken to this crisis and do something about it than are his own countrymen.

He is certain that “industrialization is the only hope for the poor.” Without stopping to disagree with this statement, I will simply add to it another one of his—“It looks very different today according to whether one sees it [the industrial revolution] from Chelsea or from a village in Asia”—which transposes the argument to another dimension. The principal fact is that “the people in the industrialized countries are getting richer, and those in the non-industrialized countries are at best standing still.” Today, the trick of getting rich is known, the rate of change is accelerating beyond all imagination, and we must face the facts.

. . . the only secret of the Russian and Chinese industrialization is that they’ve brought it off. That is what Asians and Africans have noticed. It took the Russians about forty years, starting with something of an industrial base—Tsarist industry wasn’t negligible—but interrupted by a civil war and then the greatest war of all. The Chinese started with much less of an industrial base, but haven’t been interrupted, and it looks like taking them not much over half the time. . . . For the task of totally industrializing a major country, as in China today, it only takes will to train enough scientists and engineers and technicians. Will, and quite a small number of years.

Perhaps it takes something more than will and time alone, but Snow’s notion is sufficiently clear. “It is technically possible to carry out the scientific revolution in India, Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, within fifty years . . . this is the one way out through the three menaces which stand in our way—H-bomb war, over-population, the gap between the rich and the poor. This is one of the situations where the worst crime is innocence.” The question then is how is this scientific revolution to be accomplished—and by whom?

It will be done, Snow says, either by the West, “which means mainly the U.S.,” or by the USSR. In any case, “the scale of the operation requires that it would have to be a national one.” Private capital simply can’t do it, and, he adds, “in no sense is it a fair business risk.” In addition to capital, there is the requirement of trained scientists and engineers, in which respect the Russians are already a good deal ahead. For what is needed, Snow estimates, “is something like ten thousand to twenty thousand engineers from the U.S. and here to help get the thing going.” These men would have to be prepared and adaptable enough “to devote themselves to a foreign country’s industrialization for at least ten years of their lives.”

Can this plan be brought into reality by democratic societies? The question is intractably a political one. And Snow’s answer—which is the peroration of his essay—is dismayingly candid.

“I confess . . . that I can’t see the political techniques through which the good human capabilities of the West can get into action. The best one can do, and it is a poor best, is to nag away. That is perhaps too easy a palliative for one’s disquiet. For, though I don’t know how we can do what we need to do, or whether we shall do anything at all, I do know this: that, if we don’t do it, the Communist countries will in time. They will do it at great cost to themselves and others, but they will do it. If that is how it turns out, we shall have failed, both practically and morally. At best, the West will have become an enclave in a different world. . . .”

These are hard lines from a man of undaunted hopefulness, who refuses to despair, one who has the future in his bones. He has not given up, of course, and has written this essay in the trust that it will help set in train the vast undertaking which he holds to be a necessary condition of our survival. And he does make some concrete proposals about education. Yet that last passage was written by a person who has also the traditional culture in his bones. Its urgency approaches to desperateness, and seems to me, indeed, to allow for an attitude something less than hopeful with regard, in any case, to political possibility.

It is beyond my competence to comment on this second part of the essay. But it seems to me one of the few discussions of genuine relevance to our present situation that I’ve read. It opens up for general intellectual and political argument questions which seem inevitably to get stated in special, narrow, and unpolitical terms. Despite one’s reservations about any of its cultural definitions, one must hold this book in large respect. With the virtues of the traditional culture, and the special knowledge of the scientific one, C. P. Snow is eminently qualified for the task of addressing himself to the most terrible problems of our time.

1 A review of The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution , by C. P. Snow; Cambridge University Press, 58 pp., $1.75. (Paperback 75¢)

2 Similar issues were discussed in a aeries of seminars attended by scientists and men of letters held at Columbia University last year. Several of them afterwards said that the undertaking failed to establish any substantive questions or reach any kind of agreement about the possibility of meaningful discourse.

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There are two cultures in the use of statistical modeling to reach conclusions from data. One assumes that the data are generated by a given stochastic data model. The other uses algorithmic models and treats the data mechanism as unknown. The statistical community has been committed to the almost exclusive use of data models. This commitment has led to irrelevant theory, questionable conclusions, and has kept statisticians from working on a large range of interesting current problems. Algorithmic modeling, both in theory and practice, has developed rapidly in fields outside statistics. It can be used both on large complex data sets and as a more accurate and informative alternative to data modeling on smaller data sets. If our goal as a field is to use data to solve problems, then we need to move away from exclusive dependence on data models and adopt a more diverse set of tools.

Leo Breiman. "Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (with comments and a rejoinder by the author)." Statist. Sci. 16 (3) 199 - 231, August 2001. https://doi.org/10.1214/ss/1009213726

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zbMATH: 1059.62505 MathSciNet: MR1874152 Digital Object Identifier: 10.1214/ss/1009213726

Rights: Copyright © 2001 Institute of Mathematical Statistics

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Numéro Cinq

Nature writing in america: loren eiseley’s two cultures — adam regn arvidson.

Science is in a strange predicament these days.  Political rhetoric for math and science funding abounds, but creationism, in some corners, has equal footing with evolution.  Science is set forth as the savior of the nation: we will innovate our way out of this recession, our ingenuity is our greatest asset.  But from the same mouths come cuts in funding for basic research, or else strings attached.  Such fact-centrism unfortunately sets science at odds with the arts, which are being cut even more deeply.

In 1959 British novelist-scientist C.P. Snow called this dichotomy “The Two Cultures,” a phrase Loren Eiseley references in “The Illusion of the Two Cultures,” which appeared in The American Scholar in 1964.  In his essay Eiseley, himself an anthropologist, distills his core belief:

It is because these two types of creation—the artistic and the scientific—have sprung from the same being and have their points of contact even in division, that I have the temerity to assert that, in a sense, the “two cultures” are an illusion, that they are a product of unreasoning fear, professionalism, and misunderstanding.

That theme—that science and art are born of the same mind and are therefore inseparable—permeates Eiseley’s writing and reverberates today.  Eiseley was one of the earliest practitioners of, shall we say, philosophical science writing.  He didn’t just examine the natural world and illuminate it in layperson’s terms, he considered the symbolism in scientific happenstance, and he ruminated on our true human place in the galactic flotsam.

The culmination of his career is The Star Thrower , a compendium published a year after his death in 1977.  Eiseley organized much of the book himself, drawing from magazine articles; unpublished essays and lectures; and his previous books, including The Immense Journey (1957), The Firmament of Time (1960), and The Unexpected Universe (1969).  The publication timeframe of those three major books puts Eiseley at the heart of the mid-century environmental discussion, right alongside Rachel Carson, Edward Abbey, and the other writers to be profiled in this series .  What makes Eiseley’s work unique among this group is his struggle with science.  He asks continuously whether is it all right for him, as a distinguished anthropological scientist, to feel.

The titular essay in Eiseley’s posthumous collection was originally published in The Unexpected Universe .  In it, he walks along a beach and comes upon a man throwing stranded starfish back into the ocean, an act Eiseley first sees as futile.  In the essay, he recalls the writings of G.K. Chesterton and Goethe; considers Darwin; and remembers the Biblical injunction “Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world.”  But, he writes:

I do love the world…. I love its small ones, the things beaten in the strangling surf, the bird, singing, which flies and falls and is not seen again…. I love the lost ones, the failures of the world. [This is] like the renunciation of my scientific heritage.

The next day he joins the man on the beach in lofting starfish to the waves.  If this sounds familiar, you’re probably thinking of “The Parable of the Starfish,” which took off in the 1980s and likely originated with Eiseley’s essay .  But while the parable’s moral is about making a difference in the world, Eiseley’s story is more complex.  As a scientist, he knows he should have no compassion for those starfish, he should not anthropomorphize them into beings that care whether they live or die. But he does.  “It was as though,” he writes, “at some point the supernatural had touched hesitantly, for an instant, upon the natural.”

That self-given permission to feel, in the context of scientific observation, allows Eiseley’s work to glide through long pages of evolutionary theory and the history of philosophy, then return to personal moments in nature: Eiseley rescuing, somewhat humorously, a snake and a desert hen, which had entangled themselves in an inadvertent death-struggle; Eiseley being joined for lunch beneath a dock by a muskrat; Eiseley wrestling playfully with a young fox, as if it were a puppy. And he lets himself edge toward fiction.  The previously (until The Star Thrower ) unpublished “Dance of the Frogs” and “The Fifth Planet” have a touch of the mystical. The former features a scientist skipping along a road in the presence of barely seen giant frogs; the latter tells of an amateur meteorite hunter obsessively seeking fossils of extraterrestrial life.  These remind me a lot of Barry Lopez’s fiction: in particular Desert Notes (1976, one year before The Star Thrower) and Winter Count (1981)

This mixture of science and art also gives birth to an exciting and varied language.  In one place (noticing a resemblance between eroded rock and the human brain) Eiseley trots out this tortured staccato:

The human brain contains the fossil memories of the past—buried but not extinguished moments—just as this more formidable replica contained, deep in its inner stratigraphic convolutions, earth’s past in the shape of horned titanotheres and stalking dirk-toothed cats.

And elsewhere, on the same general topic of human-nature correspondence, he keeps it simple:

For example, I once received an unexpected lesson from a spider.

So where does Eiseley sit in the pantheon of Eco-Lit?  He’s an outlier, his name not often said in the same breath as Edward Hoagland’s or Carson’s.  But The Immense Journey sold a million copies, making it an early anchor, just after Carson’s and Joseph Wood Krutch’s initial works and before Abbey and Wendell Berry.  His work is perhaps less accessible than the others, prone to long probing philosophical passages that smack more of Ivory Tower than beachcomber.  But always, just when he’s gone almost too deep into the mind, Eiseley, with the subtlest of transitions, lifts from his own experience an unforgettable tangible moment, rich with sensory detail.

Eiseley could be considered an unwitting instigator of what John Brockman calls “The Third Culture:” scientists that are also literary giants.  This is a hot subject today.  The Best American Science and Nature Writing is in its 11 th installment. Brian Greene (Mr. String Theory) regularly publishes physics books for the masses (he’s got one on the NY Times Bestseller list right now).  Neil deGrasse Tyson has brought the stars down to earth with provocative titles like Death by Black Hole and Other Cosmic Quandaries .  Mike Brown’s recent How I Killed Pluto interweaves the story of the ninth planet’s demotion with Brown’s own infant daughter’s first years.

I read The Immense Journey in college, while studying landscape architecture and also, for fun, taking courses in anthropology, cooking, raquetball, and nature writing.  Back then Eiseley went over my head, but I picked up The Star Thrower this winter.  I was reminded of an experience from a year ago.

Last March, during yet another cold weekend when I wished the long northwoods winter would just be over already, I took my toddler son to the zoo and lifted him up so he could reach into the tidepool exhibit and touch starfish and anemones.  Ethan was utterly gleeful, maybe about the strange salty water, maybe about the leathery skin of the starfish, maybe about the way the anemone tentacles stuck to his fingers like tape, but certainly about nature.  There was no scientific inquiry there, only feel. That’s what we are born with.

Science can either make us forget how to feel, or can augment our ability to feel by adding in the details, broadening connections to other things, creating excitement at the unusual.  Art and knowledge, science and literature: Eiseley’s message is to keep both vital.

Proceed to the next essay,  on Edward Abbey—the provocateur , or return to the Table of Contents .

— Adam Regn Arvidson

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•   2011 , Nature & Science , NC Magazine , Nonfiction , Vol. II, No. 3, March 2011

  39 Responses to “Nature Writing in America: Loren Eiseley’s Two Cultures — Adam Regn Arvidson”

grateful to you for writing such a thought provoking post…and grateful to wordpress for not just freshly pressing something about charlie sheen!

Loved this, absolutely loved this… and will search you out to read more. Thank you! Andrea

Science and art, born of the same mind…I couldn’t agree more. And yet, when children are young, I think too much time is spent trying to inspire them to develop their “left brain” logic and “right brain” creativity. Why don’t we try the “whole brain” approach to life?

Great post. Thank you. And Edward Abbey is a personal fave…can’t wait to see what you’ve got in store! 🙂

This reminds me of when I attempted to learn to play piano. I read many things that said people with a mathematical mind tend to pick up piano quickly. It’s like a big math problem.

Adam’s post is featured today on the WordPress.com front page under the words: “The best of 412,208 bloggers, 799,491 new posts, 418,530 comments, & 151,919,126 words posted today on WordPress.com.”

Love your blog. I was amazed and pleased to see you mention JW Krutch, an early hero of mine. I thought his name had vanished.

Where is your entry on him?

Oh, good. One rarely encounters Krutch’s name any more. I look forward to that one as well as the Abbey. Well done!

Beautiful post. I get a similar feeling from reading Richard Selzer’s writing. He writes so generously about human biology, using the body as meditation piece for really genuine observations about human relationships. I seem to recall hearing that he is now required reading in many American med programs.

Looking forward to more in the series. Thanks, Adam (and congrats on the feature)!

A little introduction: Peter Chiykowski is a newcomer, introduced to NC by Darryl Whetter. He’ll be writing book reviews and joining in otherwise. Please welcome him.

Howdy, Peter, and welcome! This is what I love about posting here, is all the new reading ideas. I haven’t heard of Selzer, so thanks for the recommendation. I’ll look forward to reading your book reviews.

Oh, I actually used to know Selzer. He was originally from Troy, NY, and I met him in Albany a couple of times. We corresponded for a while, back in the day.

“Two” or “three” cultures? Why stop at that? Seems to me some minds, feelings, and whatever else lock into one thing. There’s usually much more happening. Still, I appreciate Eiseley for not ignoring the smaller things in life. That was 40 years ago and I don’t think he was the first!

So true he wasn’t the first. And you also hit on something Eiseley is a master at: acknowledging that there is “much more happening.” His essays range from Moby Dick to Freud to fossils in Nebraska to the vagaries of the universe, and he manages to always tie them back to his theme that all we do springs from our human minds and is therefore equally valid. I would suggest Eiseley would see no hierarchy between however many cultures we choose to define. Thanks for your comment.

I enjoyed your essay! You might not be surprised to learn that Loren Eiseley and Barry Lopez have long been among my favorites. Mike Brown (of How I Killed Pluto etc.)

Mike: I’m very happy to see you here. I didn’t even have to call your name three times to conjure you.

I just finished your Pluto book and, as you must have noticed in my essay, I tend to let my world revolve around my little one, too, so I could relate. I would (and I am sure other visitors to this site would) love to hear your recommendations on good science/nature literature, either contemporary or, well, less contemporary.

Ahhh that’s a question that can make me go on and on, but here are a few of my all time favorites in science/nature literature.

Italo Calvino, Cosmicomics (this would be science/nature inspired fiction, but I still count it) Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (plus most everything else) John McPhee, take your pick (but I still can’t read the opening sequence of Los Angeles Against the Mountains, in The Control of Nature, without losing all of my fingernails). You already mentioned Eiseley and Lopez, who are high on my list. Edward Hoagland, essays in Walking the Dead Diamond River, which I last read 15 years ago, I still think about today now and then.

The list goes on, but I’ll stop there!

Thanks, Mike. I am a huge fan of McPhee, but will put these others on my list.

I had never really read much of Eiseley’s work (outside of some articles I read for school) this was a really great look at his character and thoughts on Science.

Thanks for posting this essay, Adam. Your last lines really resonate with me and I look forward to reading more essays from this series.

You did n’t mention C.P. Snow, one of the seminal thinkers on this whole issue, who, in his Rede lecture On the Two Cultures, discussed this in some detail, and most importantly saw the significance of this division, and the importance of bridging it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures

Thanks for the link eee. It is great to follow ideas back and see how they evolve as they pass through different times and writers. Adam is a scholarly guy and not one to miss something like CP Snow on the Two Cultures – sure enough, there it is in the 2nd P. Easy enough to miss in an essay jam packed with interesting ideas.

Ooh: scholarly. Now I have far too much to live up to….

But I can’t take full credit for C.P. Snow. I am actually not that familiar with him; Eiseley specifically mentions him in his own Two Cultures essay. Eiseley was very well read and was certainly aware of the debate, but I most love his anthropological spin on it: art and science spring from the same evolutionarily honed mind.

Adam, I thoroughly enjoyed reading this essay. Thank you, and congrats on being lifted up by the wordpress poobahs. Well earned.

I’ve torn apart my bookshelves tonight looking for my copy of The Star Thrower. Sadly, it seems to have disappeared. After reading your essay I was moved to re-read “Dance of the Frogs.” About a dozen years ago I made a double-sided reduced font copy of this story to take on a backpacking trip in the high sierras with a few scientist friends. It was a week long trip to celebrate the 50th birthday of a neuroscientist who studies frogs. I was feeling clever to have found this wonderful story to contribute to the festivities. One dry sparkling clear night with an awe inspiring star-filled sky, I gave a spectacular reading of the story. It fell totally flat. Ouch. I can still feel it. What was that about? Of the few scientists I know who read this sort of thing, Eiseley is not a favorite. I don’t know why. These days it is totally cool to love your organism – just don’t love your ideas about how it works. I don’t think it is the emotional content that turns scientists off of Eiseley. I wonder if perhaps some of his stories are just too far out, too esoteric? Perhaps the literary mirror image of a science tale that doesn’t quite cross the threshold to speak to a mind marinated in the arts?

Lynne, I loved the frogs essay. Gave me chills! When I read it, I had just finished a lot of Barry Lopez (and met Lopez at the winter VCFA residency), and this reminded me so much of him (even though it likely predates him). There is another whole discussion here about fiction and nonfiction that brings the reader along in a seemingly scientific, journalistic story, then makes the turn into the mystical. When Lopez does it, he explicitly calls it fiction, but he lulls you into thinking it’s not, before turning the final screw (“Buffalo” in Winter Count is a masterpiece of this). Eiseley, in the two mystical essays I cite, is less clear.

The twist is that these two essays were found by an assistant after Eiseley’s death, meaning he may not have intended them to (ever) be published…. Hmmm…

Adam, Interesting about the post-mortem discovery of the two mystical essays – he may indeed have held them back. It has been too many years since I read The Immense Journey so this morning I was paging through and discovering something of great personal interest. Eiseley had more of a role in shaping this particular scientist than she had heretofore appreciated. Thank you for bringing him back for me!

I had never read Eiseley’s essey (full disclosure here; did not even know who he was) but the way you highlighted parts of his writing was beautiful! And I would now like to read the entire essey….loved this!

Utterly fascinating. I had never heard of this man or his books before but am now interested. A thought=provoking, informative essay whose style I loved

Thanks! If you want to dive into Eiseley, definitely go for The Star Thrower. It has a good range of his decades of writing (even poetry). All The Strange Hours is his autobiography–but not the kind of autobiography you’d expect. I’ve just scratched the surface of it, but I know there are Numero Cinq readers who feel its his best work of all. Doug…?

that pic of Edward Abbey looks a little like Pierce Brosnan with a beard! congrats on FP!

Ahh, so he does. (and thanks for a comment in the true spirit of Numero Cinq!)

Great blog. Thanks for sharing!

I just have to mention this here (Thanks to AnnaMaria Johnson http://www.annamariajohnson.com for alerting me): Wendell Berry, one of the great mid-century environmental writers, was awarded the National Humanities Medal this week. Read about it in the Courier-Journal http://www.courier-journal.com/article/20110302/NEWS01/303020109/-1/GETPUBLISHED03/Wendell-Berry-receives-humanities-medal-from-Obama?odyssey=nav |head

I immensely enjoyed this post, and through it the discovery of Eyseley’s writing.

Adam, Lynne and everyone, I just want to remind everyone that Eiseley wrote an amazing memoir called All the Strange Hours which, to me, trumps his science writing. It begins with a harrowing account of a nervous breakdown and a lecture he gave in, I think, Texas, when a rat came out on the stage behind him (he couldn’t understand why the audience was tittering and laughing) and danced while he spoke.

Wow! Thanks dg. I was totally unaware of this. Will track it down.

Thanks, Adam (and dg), for adding more to my to-read list.

Adding to the kudos. great piece, AA.

My mind is very full of thought right now. Thanks, Adam!

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• © 2006

Two Cultures

Essays in Honour of David Speiser

• Kim Williams 0

Kim Williams Books, Torino, Italy

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• Interdisciplinary studies show the connections between sciences and art
• Contributions to David Speiser's own field as well as other disciplines are brought to light

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Table of contents (16 chapters)

Front matter, truesdell and the history of the theory of structures, reflections on interdisciplinarianism.

Kim Williams

The Sciences

David speiser’s group theory: from stiefel’s crystallographic approach to kac-moody algebras.

• Jean-Pierre Antoine

Whither Quantum Theory?

• David Ritz Finkelstein

The Direct Determination of the Induced Pseudoscalar Current (and About the Slow Metamorphosis of an Institution)

• Laszlo Grenacs

In Praise of Asymmetry

• Giuseppe C. La Rocca, Luigi A. Radicati di Brozolo

An Observation About the Huygens Clock Problem

• Donal Hurley, Michael Vandyck

The History of Science

Daniel bernoulli and leonhard euler on the jetski.

• Frans A. Cerulus

On the Changing Fortune of the Newtonian Tradition in Mechanics

• Giulio Maltese

Studies of Magnetism in the Correspondence of Daniel Bernoulli

• P. Radelet- Grave

On Enriques’s Foundations of Mechanics

• Piero Villaggio

On the Common Origin of Some of the Works on the Geometrical Interpretation of Complex Numbers

• Sandro Caparrini

Architecture and Music

• Siegmund Levarie

An Unusual Sacra Conversazione by Giovanni Bellini

• Bernd Wolfgang Lindemann

Ancient Astrological and Musical Analogies in The Renaissance: Palladio’s Villa Rotunda and a Geometric Construction by Leonardo

• Alessio Ageno, Orietta Pedemonte

Nuclear Arms

The gravest danger: nuclear weapons and their proliferation.

• Sidney D. Drell

Nuclear Arms Control

• Wolfgang K.H. Panofsky

Back Matter

• Mathematica
• Mathematical Essays
• Speiser, David
• complex number
• construction
• history of science
• mathematics
• ordinary differential equations

Book Title : Two Cultures

Book Subtitle : Essays in Honour of David Speiser

Editors : Kim Williams

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/3-7643-7540-X

Publisher : Birkhäuser Basel

eBook Packages : Mathematics and Statistics , Mathematics and Statistics (R0)

Copyright Information : Birkh�user Basel 2006

Hardcover ISBN : 978-3-7643-7186-9 Published: 17 November 2005

eBook ISBN : 978-3-7643-7540-9 Published: 23 February 2006

Edition Number : 1

Number of Pages : VI, 202

Topics : Applications of Mathematics , Ordinary Differential Equations

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