Sixty years ago, on May 7, 1959, physicist CP Snow delivered the Rede Lecture at the University of Cambridge. His central argument was that what he called "the intellectual life of the whole of western society" was split into two cultures – the sciences and the arts. Since then a huge amount of energy has been expended lamenting this great cultural divide. In 2019, we will see that rift healed.
Snow made the point that highly educated individuals would express incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists, yet could not describe even the simplest of scientific concepts or ideas. Snow considered that the cleverest people in the western world had about as much insight into physics or biology as their neolithic ancestors.
Today, the sciences and the arts are no longer the preserve of a small elite. Scientists are now not only happy to talk about what they do, but are also keen to listen to the interests and concerns of non-scientists and interact cooperatively. Science has become part of the cultural mainstream. Today we attend a science festival, visit a science museum or read a popular science book with the same ease and enjoyment as going to a concert, visiting a gallery or reading a novel.
In the UK’s most recent Public Attitudes to Science Survey in 2014, two-thirds of those interviewed had experienced a science-related leisure or cultural activity, such as a visit to a science museum. These individuals were also more likely to attend non-science related cultural activities. Statistics from the Science Museum in London support the idea that there is a growing trend for the sciences and arts to be embraced equally. In 2009, around 80 per cent of visitors to the museum said they had a keen interest in science, but only 65 per cent for the arts. By 2017, the same proportion (80 per cent) expressed a keen interest in science and, significantly, of these individuals an interest in history and the arts had risen to nearly 80 per cent. The same survey showed that only one in 10 visitors had an interest exclusively in science subjects.
This suggests that there are now not two groups of individuals interested in either the sciences or in arts, but a single group of people who want to experience all aspects of culture. And the numbers of individuals participating in science-based events bears this out. About 14,000 people visit the Royal Society’s Summer Science Exhibition every year – which is the maximum capacity for the building. The society currently has 200,000 Facebook fans and 190,000 Twitter followers.
More than three million people have seen the People of Science films developed by the society and the BBC, with the most popular being David Attenborough discussing Darwin. There is also good evidence for increased attendance at science events. For example, 98,000 people attended the Manchester Science Festival in 2014, and 132,000 in 2017. And the numbers of individuals world-wide participating in knowledge events is staggering. TED Talk viewings have increased to well over a billion in 10 years and the top 10 science TED Talks have been viewed more than 115m times.
Temples to science are changing too, and embracing the arts. The Science Museum’s Mathematics exhibition is a visually stunning gallery designed by Zaha Hadid Architects. Hadid herself studied mathematics at the American University of Beirut before becoming an architect and her design is an artistic response to the mathematics of airflow around an aircraft – mathematics crystallised into architecture. The museum also inspired artists such as Henry Moore, who was introduced to mathematical string models at the Science Museum and was inspired to create stringed figures that would be highly influential on a generation of sculptors. These works have been exhibited at the Royal Society and the Science Museum in parallel with contemporary work on the science of string theory.
The Science Museum has more recently commissioned artists such as Thomas Heatherwick and worked with artists such as David Hockney. And its Antarctica Live exhibition in August 2018 featured a newly devised dance performance by choreographer Corey Baker.
We understand now that the arts and sciences are the subjective and objective poles of the same great human enterprise, that there is only one world out there and we have to view it with an ever-curious and ever broadening mind. In 2019, the “two cultures” described by CP Snow in 1959 will have finally ceased to have meaning.
Russell Foster CBE, FRS is professor of circadian neuroscience at the University of Oxford
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
