Charles Percy Snow Quotes
I was moving among two groups... who had almost ceased to communicate at all, who in intellectual, moral, and psychological climate had so little in common that... one might have crossed the ocean.
Snow, C. P. The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Cambridge University Press, 1959, p. 2.
Snow was one of the first people to call attention to problem of the intellectual gulf between most educated people and scientists. As politicians generally fall into the former group, they have had a particularly difficult dealing with scientific issues since the scientific revolution of the 20th century produced this cultural chasm. See {635974} for one of his conclusions.
He raised an intellectual alarm that scientists were generally ignorant of the liberal arts and non-scientists were scientifically illiterate. This was not good for society where both were needed for making public policy and developing our society. He was quite influential in British and American higher education where many colleges added required science courses to liberal arts curricula and vica versa. However by the 21st century, the sciences had advanced at such a rapid pace, that the taking of a few college level science courses was not sufficient to produce a scientific literacy, and the problem was no better than in the 1950s.
Charles Percy Snow, Baron Snow, CBE was an English novelist and physical chemist who also served in several important positions in the British Civil Service and briefly in the UK government. He is best known for his series of novels known collectively as Strangers and Brothers, and for The Two Cultures, a 1959 lecture in which he laments the gulf between scientists and "literary intellectuals".