Editorial

Excerpt

C.P. Snow (1905–1970) had a remarkable career as a scientist, a science administrator, and a novelist in Great Britain. His contributions achieved wide recognition, especially for his 1959 lecture at Cambridge entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. It later became a book that has been studied and argued over in the decades since its publication. Many college students have had to deal with its contents and implications as have others who may have missed it earlier on in their educational experience. In it Snow described a growing split between the humanities and the sciences constituting a crisis for what it meant to be an educated person. Snow was thus able to identify what we now call scientific illiteracy among those expected to assume power and responsibility in the professions and the body politic. Snow later postulated a third culture of the social sciences which he viewed as lying somewhere between the humanities and the “hard” sciences as a place where human nature and the natural world might be discovered and explored. It is important to note that Snow’s slim volume is regularly counted among one of the most important books of the last century. …