leeds, england

Claims by the late British novelist C. P. Snow that a ‘two cultures’ gap separates those who have studied the humanities from those who have studied the sciences came under spirited attack last week from a historian of science for misrepresenting the central role science and technology have long played in British life.

“Snow is part of the problem, not the solution,” David Edgerton of Imperial College, London, told the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in Leeds. He described Snow as an example of “declinist whinging” about British culture which remains “very popular among scientists and engineers”.

Snow trained and worked as a physicist before the Second World War, later becoming a prominent novelist, a civil servant advising on scientific recruitment, and eventually a government minister.

His ‘two cultures’ thesis, presented in a lecture given in Cambridge in the late 1950s, remains widely quoted. Snow argued that British culture, in contrast to that of its main economic competitors, had traditionally been ‘anti-scientific’ and opposed to technical progress. The lecture itself is still in print.

But, Edgerton points out, Snow “has no explanation for the rise of British science”, nor for the 50-fold increase in the number of scientists in Britain between 1902 and 1966. “Snow is invoking an England without Charles Babbage, Michael Faraday, James Joule or Lord Kelvin,” he says. “Indeed without anything that could possibly explain that creation and rise of new universities with their strong emphasis on science and engineering, or the continued growth of British science-based industry.”

Edgerton also criticizes Snow's international comparisons, suggesting that there is also reason to doubt his description of Britain's apparent weakness. “Britain may have been deficient in turning out graduates in science and engineering compared to the USA and the USSR, but not France, Germany or Japan,” he says.

Snow's characterization of the ‘two cultures’ gap, built largely on the accepted fact that most senior politicians and civil servants came from humanities backgrounds — while many academics from such disciplines were often disparaging about their scientific colleagues — remains the starting point for much discussion about issues such as the future of Britain's education system.

But Edgerton complains that Snow's vision is based almost entirely on attitudes towards academic research physicists, while the views taken to represent British culture as a whole are predominantly those of British novelists.

“The fact that Snow has been taken seriously is a testimony to the importance of science in British culture,” said Edgerton. “A modern justification for the [study of] the history of British science is not that Snow was right, but that he was profoundly wrong.”