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C00002 00002 snow[f84,jmc] There are only one and a half cultures now.
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snow[f84,jmc] There are only one and a half cultures now.
C. P. Snow in his {\it Two Cultures} claimed that there
existed two cultures in the modern world, a scientific future oriented
culture, and a litereary culture more traditional in character and
oriented toward the past. Though a novelist, he had been a scientist
and then an administrator of wartime scientific projects. The
scientist characters in his novels usually suffered from not being better
scientists than they were, and they also didn't get along very well with
their wives. Real scientists do indeed suffer when they can't solve
the problems they have set themselves, and they also suffer when
they are less successful than their competitors, although this depends
on whether the scientific field is very competitive.
While Snow's point was made in a quite general way applicable
to all advanced countries and over a considerable historical period,
it seems to me that more details than he might have admitted were
specific to wartime Britain and the immediate postwar era. What
bothered Snow was that effectiveness of applied scientific projects
was adversely affected by their ultimate control by the literary
gentlement of the British Civil Service, perhaps especially the Treasury
bureaucrats, who had a lot of power in that system.
In America there has been less trouble of that kind during
World War II and since.