Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

---

It seems there are those cultural issues that never die down. They keep coming up from time and turn into topics for debate every time. One such issue is the relationship (in the opinion of some, a fierce confrontation) between the arts and the sciences. That issue was brought up famously by CP Snow, first in a series of lectures, then in a small book called The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.

Snow knew what he was talking and writing about since he was both a novelist and a physicist. He was also a government official in charge of recruiting scientists for the government service. I had the pleasure of meeting Snow in congresses of PEN and had the opportunity to listen to his argument first hand. He believed that there was a chasm between the arts and the sciences. He was critical of both "the smug literary intellectual with his hollow knowledge of science and the dull unimaginative scientist ignorant about literature."

Snow claimed that hostility between the arts and sciences was not only culturally damaging, but also politically ruinous. His solution was "reform of the educational system, ending premature specialisation, raising the school leaving age and improving the social prestige of teachers". I remember him saying, "I felt I was moving between two groups that had so little in common that instead of going from South Kensington (where the Imperial College is situated) to Chelsea (the artists' district), one might have crossed the ocean."

The issue was raised by many writers after Snow. We find the Nobel Laureate Ronald Hoffman asking, "why are scientific achievements alone subject to interrogation, and not art?" The reason, he thinks, is that scientists are not recognised by the media. Unlike artists, whose work has an immediate impact, he goes on to say, scientists progress in silence and isolation.

One professor of history and philosophy of science at University College, London, at least, insists that science and art are shoulder to shoulder. Einstein and Picasso made their greatest breakthroughs almost simultaneously; and the connection, he suggests, cannot have been entirely serendipitous. Both, he claims, were concerned with the same problem: simultaneity and spatial representation. A conclusion he comes out with is that the chasm between the arts and the sciences may be an illusion. When the public realises that scientists and artists in every age work side by side on the same issue, perhaps they will be as open to scientific developments as they are to artistic ones.

And now after more than half a century of CP Snow's The Two Cultures, we find the issue is still discussed. In an article in the London Observer Tim Adams writes about "The new age of ignorance" and asks "how much do we really know about the basic questions of science that control our lives?" He quotes CP Snow as saying, "a good many times I have been present at a gathering of people who, by the standards of the national culture, are thoroughly 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 ever read a work of Shakespeare?"