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The Two Cultures (1959) [pdf] (weber.edu)
110 points by raviksharma on May 11, 2023 | hide | past | favorite | 70 comments



> 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?

But that's not quite true, is it. In the one case, he's asking someone to explain a very specific thing (one particular physical law), and in the other you're asking if they have been exposed to any example from a large set of things (any of Shakespeare's plays). If he'd asked "how many of you have heard of the Second Law of Thermodynamics", or if he'd asked "how many of you can describe the plot of Coriolanus" the questions would be closer to equivalent.

Nitpicky, but relevant in the sense that it's not a fair example as originally stated.


I don't buy that. The Second Law of Thermodynamics is not only basic, but can be stated in a sentence. Being able to generally recall the plot of Romeo & Juliet (or any Shakespeare play) is objectively harder than being able to spit out that sentence. I'll make the bold claim that Second Law of Thermodynamics would be recalled by far more scientists than the plot of Coriolanus would be by MFAs.

The worst thing we do is fail to teach statistics to liberal arts majors. Then, as citizens, they make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things they advocate for or are against, and can be easily manipulated in any direction with attacks on their availability heuristics.


I would bet you money if you asked a random sampling of college grads, 10x the number of people could roughly summarize Romeo and Juliet than the second law of thermodynamics.


Which is a bit of shame since the two cultures are of roughly equal importance to the future prospects of college grads.


The Two Cultures isn’t just about lamenting that science knowledge is underrepresented though. The tragedy is that for a typical college grad they can do one or the other but not both.


>>> is objectively harder

I don't think it's objectively harder - at the very least, [citation needed]. It might be subjectively harder for you. But one is a random factoid, the other one is a story. Humans are, in general, exceedingly good at stories. Facts, we tend to focus on the areas we know. You and I might be good at physics facts, or software facts. Somebody else might be good at agriculture facts, or knitting facts, or what-have-you.

But stories are universal. They connect. It's how most of humanity learns and shares knowledge. (See e.g. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-02036-8)

There's a pretty good likelihood that stories are ultimately easier to remember for a larger number of people than facts.

>>> Then, as citizens, they make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things they advocate for

I'll note that you're possibly wrong about relative costs of learning, too. What matters isn't only what you learn (though teaching stats would sure be a good thing), but also a willingness to approach issues with a bit of humility, and not claiming something as absolute fact until it provably is.


"a random factoid" would be "the NY subway has 493 stations".

The laws of Thermodynamics are fundamentals like "what is democracy"


I'm talking about the shape of the information, not its relative importance.

Humans deal better with one shape than the other. That's the reason so many memorization techniques rely on stringing things together in stories.


"First be a human" is objectively hard. Stories "appear designed to coordinate social behaviour and promote cooperation" from your link, as a functional component of groups of people. Scientific laws, and other random factoids abstracted from character plotlines typically do not "arise spontaneously in children".

The frequent retellings of familiar stories with new characters and plot twists suggests to me that there might not be as much learning involved in stories as pattern recognition. I have no citations to back that up but would be delighted to read a story that critiques the accepted story story.


Why would frequent reteling sugest there is not much learning?


Because so many of the stories are already familiar.


Perhaps a version of the second law can be described in one sentence ("heat flows from hot to cold", perhaps), but when I go to the Wikipedia page, it's quite a bit more complicated than that (e.g. existence/importance of entropy). Romeo and Juliet is quite a bit simpler -- forbidden love, mistaken suicide.


Yeah, the one sentence would be "entropy in a closed system can only increase"


> make obvious mistakes about the relative costs and effects of things

Didn't that ship already sail when they became liberal arts majors?


These days English majors do tend to know about entropy, thanks to Stoppard.


It's also picking on a particularly difficult area. The "second law of thermodynamics" is actually extremely subtle. In its original formulation it's basically a big mess talking about energy flows. In its simple/elegant/modern form, it relies on an understanding of this crazy thing called "entropy" which is measured like energy but isn't, and which gets pushed with an "intuitive" interpretation that is anything but ("disorder" ... is a measurable thing with numbers associated with it?!).

Frankly if you take a bunch of actual physics students out of the crowd immediately after having taken their final exam in statistical mechanics and ask them that same question, my guess is you'd only see about 50% of them give a confident and correct answer.

So... yeah. If you instead ask a bunch of random people "can anyone explain the idea of conservation of energy?" (the first law, of course), you're going to do much better.


Is the plot of Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet not as subtle or layered as to provoke the exact same analysis?

You could describe it in a sentence or two, or you could write a book explaining why the typical summary misses out on the subtle details that really make it so interesting.


Yeah but the question was whether you read any of those plays, not whether you can provide detailed analysis or explain it.


It is not that hard to understand that a broken glass won't mend itself spontaneously


No, but understanding that fact is at most a naive and useless understanding the second law of thermodynamics. It's the numbers in there that make it a scientific "law". And a numeric understanding of entropy is totally bananas.


For some definition of useless, I suppose. Without trying to be contrary, most of what I (we) know is 'useless' in terms of whether my knowing it has a "useful" impact on my life. Knowing that there's an equation governing gravitational attraction doesn't really impact my life experientially. It's true that if you're trying to design any system that involves a Carnot cycle, it becomes useful, but given no such job description, it's not 'useful' information. Much of science _is_ useful in our STEM-oriented world, to those using it.

I think some of the reality is that regardless of most other factors in our lives, love and relationships are a Big Deal, so stories in that realm have in some small way more usefulness. Thus, I know the plot of Romeo and Juliet better than I can give a summary of the Second Law.


If you asked people "Will a broken glass mend itself spontaneously?", they will all get it correct. That's not the sort of question people fail to be able to answer. The sort of thing question people fail to be able to answer is "What is the Second Law of Thermodynamics?".


Yes, but a broken glass has much less entropy than an intact glass at a slightly higher temperature.


Lots of people just don’t have the brainpower to be comfortable with abstract physical or mathematical concepts. Nearly everyone can understand a love story.


Isn't part of the point of Romeo and Juliet that it's not a love story? Romeo and Juliet thought they were in love but they really were hormonal teens who knew each other for only two days. My understanding is that's the purpose of Romeo's initial infatuation with Rosaline; it shows that he's really just someone in love with the idea of being in love.


Potato potato


"The second law of thermodynamics" is also a rather undescriptive name. Which one is called the first law, which one is called the second law, which one is called the third law, etc? I can't keep it straight myself.


I think Snow is assuming that given that audience (academics educated in the traditional humanities) that if someone affirms they have ‘read’ something they can be assumed to also know what that thing was about.


"Heat cannot of itself pass from one body to a hotter body." Thank you, Flanders and Swann! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VnbiVw_1FNs


But the second law of thermodynamics is such a fundamental physical law.

Here is a more apt equivalent question: "do you read a book front to back or back to front?"

(Mostly joking)


I feel like knowing the rough plot of hamlet is about equivalent of knowing roughly what the idea of newton's law of gravity is.


I would also point out that Shakespeare plays are ... well plays. Nit something meant to be read, byt something meant to be seen. And most people read it only if their school assigned it as mandatory reading, because reading plays is not much of a pleasure.


I don't think that's nitpicky, I think that's a very clear flaw.


During my CS degree, I had an opportunity to take a course which sought to bridge these two cultures. The class was described as a kinetic art and embedded systems class opened to EE, CE, CS and art students.

We'd study some essays like Snow's "The Two Cultures" and create reports on contemporary artists before breaking up into groups consisting of both engineering and art students with the goal of designing and implementing kinetic art. Coming from the engineering side, it was fun for me to get the chance to experience an academic art setting, and I think the class overall helped me overcome being immediately dismissive of more conceptual art as well as showing me tools and the frame of mind to approach and appreciate art.

For the artists, I think the goal of our professor was to build some technical literacy, and provide them with the technology that could inspire them, expanding their breadth of what could be feasibly done.

Though like this essay, the relationship between the two cultures could seem like it would turn adversarial or pretentious or dismissive, but I believe everyone in the class had a great time, and were all just excited to create things together.


Related articles in math and stats communities:

- The Two Cultures of Mathematics by Tim Gowers: https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~wtg10/2cultures.pdf

Discusses theory builders (think algebra) vs. problem solvers (think combinatorics) in mathematics, and how the latter have been sort of marginalized and under-appreciated in the community.

- Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures by the legendary Leo Breiman

https://projecteuclid.org/journals/statistical-science/volum...

Discusses predictive modeling (think random forests and NNs) vs. statistical inference (think null hypothesis significance testing), and how the former have been under-appreciated in the stats community, to the detriment of statisticians.

Both very fun reads by two giants.


Besides for also using the phrase "two cultures" in the title, those two (excellent) papers are not related to this at all.


Gowers literally starts his paper by

“In his famous Rede lecture of 1959, entitled “The Two Cultures”, C. P. Snow argued that the lack of communication between the humanities and the sciences was very harmful, and he particularly criticized those working in the humanities for their lack of understanding of science.”

For sure Tim Gowers would start a paper by citing a completely unrelated paper, which incidentally has the same title as his own.


I get confused who is complaining about who. It reminds me of the two Spiderman meme where each are pointing at each other [1].

Most recently, I was watching an interview with Iain McGilchrist. His thesis in "The Master and His Emissary" is that our society has veered too far towards the intellectual. According to his thesis, scientific concerns are dominating our decision making processes. The ills in society are caused by the exclusion of "right brain" or intuitive thinking in modern governance and in the general culture of modern society.

I don't really have an opinion on who is right or wrong. I can't really say if scientists lack sufficient knowledge about humanities subjects or visa versa. But it does feel like each side is pointing the finger at the other side.

It doesn't even matter what side you support, e.g. if you think McGilchrist is a crank or an apologist for a particular kind of reactionary element that is taking over populist rhetoric. There can be no movement towards a middle-ground when both sides insist that they are the ones being misunderstood and oppressed.

1. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/spider-man-pointing-at-spider...


It would generally be fine if scientific concerns dominated decision making processes in most domains. The problem is that decision makers often decide based on their own preconceptions and biases, then justify those decisions after the fact with a thin veneer of cherry-picked "science". Then they use logical fallacies to demonize their opponents as "anti-science".

(This is a general comment about problematic decision making and is not a political attack on any individual person or party. I have observed similar patterns across the political spectrum.)

The one area where scientific concerns must never be allowed to dominate is in fundamental freedoms and human rights. Those cannot be analyzed scientifically in any productive way.


I think my choice of words "scientific concerns" was poor. And to steel-man McGilchrist's position is difficult since he writes voluminous books that I honestly don't have the patience to read in their entirety. So I kind of have to piece together his ideas from the 3 or 4 podcasts I've seen him on. I also don't entirely agree with his framing.

As I understand it, his principle complaint is that analytical thinking has become the default mechanism for decision making. For example, if we were to have a discussion on whether people should live in cities or suburbs/rural areas, some people would immediately go to quantities and metrics. Maybe questions about carbon footprints or the cost of transportation or the ability to distribute food. In fact, given the demographic of HN, the vast majority here would probably think that was the correct approach. McGilchrist argues that is the result of indoctrination.

As a counter example, consider yourself feeling hungry and looking in the fridge to decide what to eat. You are unlikely to make that decision primarily based on some kind of analytical process involving calories or costs. You might take those into account (e.g. by avoiding eating cake for breakfast or something) but you would also use your intuition and preference. The same is true when you choose where to vacation, or what music to listen to, or who to marry.

Yet applying the same kind of preference to most other societal decisions is frowned upon these days. We are taught to think critically, to follow the data, to use logic as our primary means. We are trained to silence the non-analytic parts of our decision making process as if allowing them to influence our decisions is almost evil. We are taught to be objective and to break down complex questions into smaller pieces that we can quantify.

This leads to a mismatch between the kind of decision making process that is natural in most areas of life and the decision making processes we champion in modern education and policy making. If you are to believe him, half of our brain is dedicated to an intuitive decision making process - so we are advocating for throwing out half of our wisdom. In his view, if an entire half of our brain is dedicated to that kind of reasoning then we should consider that it has sufficient usefulness that we ought not to completely ignore it or work so hard to suppress it.

Again, I'm poorly steel-manning his position and I don't entirely agree with him. But there is something to be said about his position and its effects. It is hard not to see the general trend to use science to answer all questions, even those that you point out ought to remain free from its dominance.


This is interesting. I have discovered my own variant of this in analysing some documents for a client. My initial instinct was to approach it quantitatively, but a friend suggested looking into how these things are done qualitatively in social science.

I'm still learning it and it's interesting but I can't shake the feeling that the process almost seems designed to day-dream up patterns and connections between things where there are none. On the other hand, any more quantitative approach seems like it would only be useful to confirm my pre-existing beliefs, and not significantly innovate on them.

Perhaps we need a bit of both.


Related:

The Two Cultures and The Scientific Revolution (1959) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30203398 - Feb 2022 (2 comments)

C.P. Snow – The Two Cultures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19328386 - March 2019 (1 comment)

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12568791 - Sept 2016 (1 comment)

The Two Cultures - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6560085 - Oct 2013 (80 comments)

The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1025501 - Jan 2010 (1 comment)

Are We Beyond the Two Cultures? - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=598451 - May 2009 (1 comment)


Future release: Protoculture's Technological Revolution


The submitted URL was https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures but I think we can handle the actual lecture, so I've switched to a copy of that above.


This is starting to trend in the opposite direction, however I find the problem is more along these lines: https://massivesci.com/articles/chaos-in-the-brickyard-comic...


I made a new thread here because it's one of my favourites.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35909505


1963?

The progress hasn't stopped since then though the comics seem even more relevant today.


Another quote which gets to the heart of it, I think:

>I remember G.H. Hardy remarking to me in the 30's with some mild puzzlement: 'Have you noticed how the word "intellectual" is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition that doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me.'

Its scientists complaining about not being accepted by the "cool kids". A tale as old as time.


That’s because studying the humanities is quite a bit different than studying a technical field.

The humanities are broadly trying to answer “what does it mean to be a human, and how should we live?”

Sure, physics provides the occasional relevant answer, but less directly. It discovers facts about nature, and sometimes those facts give the discussion more context.


>The humanities are broadly trying to answer “what does it mean to be a human, and how should we live?”

That's quite condescending. Scientists must not know how to live, or what it means to be human, since they don't have an English degree.

Look, the humanities is where people who say things like "I'm not good with numbers" go. That's it.


That is incredibly dismissive and doesn't hold up to even the meagerest investigation. Additionally it's offensive.

edit: but since I'm here and fired up. here are some results from the trivial google search "famous humanities majors"

https://time.com/3964415/ceo-degree-liberal-arts/

https://blog.tesu.edu/10-notably-successful-people-with-libe...

https://www.businessinsider.com/successful-liberal-arts-majo...


I never said any of that.

Perhaps you could benefit from a humanities education to learn how to respond an argument and construct your own.


>I never said any of that.

Ah, but you did, and you stepped in something that a lot of scientists (and devs) resent, having others assume that they are robots, without heart or passion or insight. What you said was even worse, one group of people are trying to understand "what it means to be human", implying that the other group of people is not. It's literally dehumanizing, and I called you out, and now you're responding with a puerile "is to".

I have two degrees, one in physics, one in philosophy, and with this response I realize I need to review the literature on expected value.


That's not how I read his comment. Somewhat puzzled as to how you arrived at your reading.

Humanities are the disciplines that focus on the question of what it is to be human. Sciences are the disciplines that focus on understanding physical reality, and in an indirect way the changes in our understanding of nature and physical reality do impact the discourse in Humanities.

None of that even remotely means anyone not involved in humanities is a "robot". You resent caricature of "devs" as "robots, without heart or passion or insight" and that is a false picture of devs, agreed. But that has nothing to do with the question of the two cultures.

The two cultures (actually the author managed to find a 3rd in "engineering" in his rather rambling rant) are ultimately about "tools". Here the tools in question are 'cognitive tools'.

The cultures are really cultures that grow around distinct cognitive tools.


I still did not say any of that


> Look, the humanities is where people who say things like "I'm not good with numbers" go. That's it.

When they say that, they don't mean it literally. It's like if they found themselves in a discussion about cleaning public toilets. They might say "Oh I'm not good with mops and liquid cleaning agents" or whatever to be polite, when what they really mean is more like "Oh I have people for that, I'm sorry to hear that you have to sell your time and labor for money, your grandparents should have been wealthier." but that would be rude and unproductively antagonistic.


Science teaches us that being human is not particularly special.


Does it?


G.H. Hardy’s sense of humor was famously self-deprecating.


I think the issue is far greater than just two cultures. Yes, people from the humanities and the sciences have problems talking to each other, but people in different fields of science do too. And not just major differences like chemists talking to biologists -- I mean even biologists from different subfields.


In hindsight, he has misjudged the situation. Scientific education is not the key. If we accept that there are only two cultures, then the Russian decline shows that focusing on science was the wrong choice.

>Anyway, the Russians have judged what kind and number of educated men and women a country needs to come out top in the scientific revolution. I am going to oversimplify, but their estimate, and I believe it's pretty near right

>As the scientific revolution goes on, the call for these men will be something we haven't imagined, though the Russians have.

>If our ancestors had invested talent in the industrial revolution instead of the Indian Empire, we might be more soundly based now. But they didn't.


Germany was one of the most scientifically literate and scientifically advanced nations at the start of WW2. Scientific knowhow did not prevent them from leading their society and the world in a catastrophic direction.


I derive these comments from the introduction by Stefan Collini (a lit professor) in the Cambridge UP edition of "The Two Cultures". (https://www.amazon.com/Two-Cultures-Canto-Classics/dp/110760...)

Snow had a PhD in chemistry, but dropped out of science early on to write popular novels and to become a very successful bureaucrat. He had originally intended to call this lecture "The Rich and the Poor", because he was arguing about who was best qualified to govern society and solve the problems of the Third World.

The gist of the speech is that the traditional elites of society are not competent to govern because all they know about is the classics. He thinks only a scientific background can create a wise leader. If only a large enough percentage of the population would get a technical education, then society would become rational.

His position was extremely naive and never seriously accepted as he put it. The subsequent use of the term "two cultures" to mean a disjunction of the humanistic and scientific approaches to knowledge is not quite what he meant. He was railing against traditionalism and venting a deep animosity toward England's literary society.

A quote from William James:

Of all the insufficient authorities as to the total nature of reality, give me the "scientists" . . . Their interests are most incomplete and their professional conceit and bigotry immense. I know of no narrower sect or club, in spite of their excellent authority in the line of fact they have explored, and their splendid achievements there.


‘I remember G. H. Hardy once remarking to me in mild puzzlement, some time in the 1930s: "Have you noticed how the word 'intellectual' is used nowadays? There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac or Adrian or me. It does seem rather odd, don't y'know?".’

  - C. P. Snow


Since the Industrial Revolution, scientific progress has far outstripped progress in the humanities. We've gotten very good at answering the how, but not the why (or why not).


I guess that depends on your POV: I’m pretty much a reductionist, so I find the various hypotheses re where the universe and life come from to be quite compelling.

There is no why, really.

The more interesting question revolves around should, from an ethical/moral perspective. The analytic tradition so favoured in the UK since Hume has been shown to be cracked (read, e.g., The Women Are Up To Something). Since WWII, progress has been made on that question, but Hume’s acolytes still cling dearly to mind, perhaps because of that same reductionism.


The humanities were discarded for entertainment and marketing, and the criticism of entertainment and marketing, ultimately based on predicting/motivating sales and attempting to explain when those sales predictions turn out to be wrong.


> 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 neolithic ancestors would have had.

This is a very nice way to try and explain Dilbert-style Pointy Haired Bosses.


> '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 about the scientific equivalent of "Have you read a work of Shakespare's?"'

It's right there in Yeats, which the author also references:

> "Turning and turning in the widening gyre / The falcon cannot hear the falconer / Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold /"

Carl Sagan's Pale Blue Dot image (14 February 1990) is rather deceptive when it comes to understanding the story of life on earth in the context of the fundamental laws of thermodynamics, but here it is:

https://www.planetary.org/worlds/pale-blue-dot

Let's say we took that planet and dropped it out to the orbit of Pluto, which we also now have some great imagery of. Pluto is indeed chemically active, it turns out, in the subzero real of nitrogen ices and so on. Hence a better picture would be a transit of Earth across the Sun from say, the perspective of Mars:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transit_of_Earth_from_Mars

> "No one has ever seen a transit of Earth from Mars, but the next transit will take place on November 10, 2084. The last such transit took place on May 11, 1984."

The only reason life developed on the 'pale blue dot' was that it was at a fairly optimal distance from our local star, which is pouring energy out into space at a ridiculous level relative to the amount captured by this tiny planet. That huge flood of energy is what allows life to swim upstream against the tide of entropy, aka the Second Law, by using that energy to create complex structures of only fleeting permanence, but eventually humans learned to use excess plant production to feed the literary geniuses who created the great works of imagination. Genetic information transfer was the imperfect mechanism (note all species go extinct over time) behind this story.

In literary-vs-science 'two-culture' terms, a return to sun-worship is a nice way of closing the gap. The Egyptians seem to have adopted the concept for ~150 human generations, maybe they were smarter than we are?


Claude's[1] critique of The Two Cultures:

Here are some critiques of CP Snow's The Two Cultures:

1. It oversimplifies the relationship between science and humanities. Snow frames it as a polarization between the "two cultures" of science and literature, but in reality there are many connections, overlaps, and interactions between the fields.

2. It ignores the social sciences. Snow focuses mainly on natural science vs. literature, but ignores fields like psychology, sociology, economics, and political science that don't cleanly fit into either category.

3. It employs a deficit model. Snow portrays humanities scholars as lacking an understanding of science, rather than recognizing that both fields have different but legitimate areas of expertise.

4. It is Eurocentric. Snow's view of "culture" is rooted mainly in Western European traditions of science and literature. It ignores non-Western cultures and knowledge systems.

5. It frames science as value-neutral and objective while implying that humanities are value-laden and subjective. Many scholars argue that science is also shaped by social and cultural values.

6. It may exaggerate the gulf between the two cultures. While there are differences, there is also significant overlapping membership, shared influences, and common aims between scientists and humanities scholars.

7. It is dated. Snow's analysis, written in 1959, does not reflect many of the recent interactions and intersections between science and humanities that have emerged since then.

---

On the last point, Claude elaborates:

... here are some ways that CP Snow's The Two Cultures has become more dated since it was published in 1959:

1. Increased interdisciplinary work: There has been a major growth in interdisciplinary research that integrates methods and insights from both science and humanities. Fields like science and technology studies, cognitive literary studies, and neurohumanities have emerged.

2. Collaboration between scientists and humanists: There are many more examples today of scientists and humanities scholars working together on collaborative projects. This was less common when Snow was writing.

3. Science in humanities curriculum: Many humanities programs now incorporate more history, philosophy and social aspects of science into their curriculum. Students are exposed to both fields more holistically.

4. Humanities in science curriculum: There is a growing trend of incorporating ethics, communication and other humanities topics into science education as well. This helps develop more well-rounded scientists.

5. Porous boundaries: The traditional boundaries between disciplines have become more porous, allowing for ideas, methods and approaches to cross-pollinate between fields.

6. Broader public discourse: There is a more nuanced and sophisticated public discourse around science, technology and society that incorporates both scientific and humanistic perspectives.

7. Advances in technology: Rapid technological changes, like the internet and AI, have created new intersections and dialogues between science and humanities that Snow could not have envisioned.

So in general, over the past 60 years since The Two Cultures was published, there has been a massive increase in interaction, dialogue and integration between science and humanities. The traditional "gulf" that Snow described has become far more complex, multidirectional and dynamic. The metaphor of "two cultures" has become less relevant and useful to describe modern academia and intellectual life.

[1] - https://poe.com/Claude-instant




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