The Two Cultures

The Two Cultures is the title of a book by C.P. Snow, based on a 1959 Rede lecture, at Cambridge University, entitled "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." In this lecture, the cultures were the "literary intellectuals" and the "natural scientists". The former group were not so much academics as contemporary literary writers and critics. Snow's specific terms were literary colleagues and scientists. For constantly I felt I was moving between two groups &mdash; comparable in intelligence, identical in race, earning about the same incomes, who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral and psychological climate that instead of going from Burlington House or South Kensington to Chelsea, one might have crossed an ocean. In fact, one had travelled much further than across an ocean &mdash; because after a few thousand Atlantic miles, one found Greenwich Village talking precisely the same language as Chelsea, and both having about as much communication with M.I.T. (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) as though the scientists spoke nothing but Tibetan.