The Empire of Science

__"A View from the Bridge: The Two Cultures Debate, Its Legacy, and the History of Science" by D. Graham Burnett, in Daedalus (Spring 1999), Norton’s Woods, 136 Irving St., Cambridge, Mass. 02138.__

Forty years ago, British novelist and former scholarly symposia, cited by academic adminisphysicist C. P. Snow (1905–80) decried the trators, and invoked to help account for everychasm separating "the two cultures," scientific thing from the ‘science wars’ to the history of and literary, stirring up tremendous controversy environmental policy," observes Burnett, a hison both sides of the Atlantic. The disjunction torian of science at Columbia University. Snow posited is still "regularly lamented in Unfortunately, he contends, the "Snovian disjunction," as it has been called, is simplistic and pernicious.

In his 1959 lecture at Cambridge University, Snow claimed that scientists "have the future in their bones," while literary intellectuals and other humanists could not even describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics, which, he asserted, was roughly "the scientific equivalent" of a play by Shakespeare. The result was a traditional (nonscientific) culture devoid of "social hope." And this, in the context of the Cold War and the rising expectations of "poor" nations, he warned, was dangerous.

Three years later, British literary critic F. R. Leavis (1895–1978) mounted a venomous attack. To link "social hope" and material goods, Leavis said, was "a confusion to which all creative writers are tacit enemies." Science and technology would never bridge the gap between the individual and society; only language and literature could allow human beings to transcend themselves. Any comparison between the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the sacred sphere of literature was just "a cheap journalistic infelicity," Leavis said.

"For the historian of science," writes Burnett, "a double irony binds these claims" about the Second Law of Thermodynamics. That law, articulated in various ways beginning in the 1850s, holds that while energy is conserved, entropy (or disorder) seems to be constantly increasing in the universe. The implication— that the universe "appears headed for maximum entropy or ‘heat-death’ " —was spelled out in popular journals and impressed writers in Britain and France, as scholars have shown. "If you take it to heart," wrote the novelist Joseph Conrad, "it becomes an unendurable tragedy." Thus, Burnett points out, "the very decay Snow decried in the moral fiber of literary culture, it turns out, cannot be fully understood without reference to the history of his own beloved Second Law."

At the same time, and with equal irony, Burnett adds, Conrad’s Shadow-Line (1917), "which Leavis brought forward as a self-evident proof of the irrelevance of the Second Law, would be better read as a parable of its broad cultural significance."

In the hands of those who use it, Burnett says, the "two cultures" disjunction—given renewed expression, for instance, in Consilience (1998) by Edward O. Wilson, the founding father of sociobiology—tends to devalue humanistic inquiry. In Wilson’s eyes, according to Burnett, "the humanities and social sciences represent science’s last frontier," a domain awaiting conquest. The real need, however, suggests the historian of science, is not to "bridge" Snow’s two cultures, but to recognize that both are part of a larger culture and to understand how they and it came to be.