THE THIRD CULTURE

SPECIAL ISSUE 1999

"I don’t worry about filling any communication gap between intellectuals in the arts and sciences. What worries me in the United States are the members of the «religious right» who oppose the teaching of Darwin’s theory of evolution, and, recently, Big Bang cosmology in public schools. It’s very hard to figure out how to reach these people. It’s disheartening because it’s clear that they have fundamentally rejected the scientific method as a legitimate way to advance knowledge. They are strong politically, and unfortunately have a lot of influence on public policy."

"This is not a trivial question. It is not just a matter of scientists being informed about culture and artists being informed about science. Scientists, in general, do not like to use their time showing or explaining people what they do. On the other hand, art, music, literature, and other cultural works do not need to be explained: they are just wonderful creations that we can enjoy and admire, or dislike, even if we know nothing about how to produce them. It only takes artistic sensibility, which is inherent to all (or most) human beings. Just by having some one listen to Beethoven’s nine symphony, you can make him/her understand and feel what music is about. It is hard for me to imagine how to make someone feel in 60 minutes what astronomy or other science is about, much less to a large audience. Perhaps we were closer to this integral intellectual in the Renaissance, when people like da Vinci were scientists and artists at the same time.

I do think, however, that our concept of knowledge, learning, teaching, and education in general is changing. Now we all, scientists or intellectuals, know how to travel or navigate the WWW. Perhaps this revolution in computing and information technology will change so much the way we see, do, and think about things that we all can become artists or scientists just by clicking a mouse. The world will become more uniform and boring, and talent may be redefined. Again, as I mentioned above, this question pertains to an insignificant minority of the earth population."

"I would like to be optimistic about this, but in the US at least I also see what sometimes seems to be increasingly broad divisions and compartmentalizations between scientific, technical, artistic, and popular cultures. The present educational system does not educate everyone equally (of course, it probably never has!), and seems to increasingly stress compartmentalization and specialization."

"There was a recent debate on precisely this topic in the UK by a distinguished panel accompanied by much publicity in the national press. I have to say I found the arguments for and against rather contrived and frankly irrelevant. It seems this was an excuse for an intellectual debate rather than one with any purpose. There’s a scientist and an artist in each of us with different mixtures, so why is it necessary for us to define something new that merges those characteristics?"

"I can only express my very personal viewpoint about relationships between arts and sciences. I have to say that I am so delighted in many aspects of arts (painting, classical music, architecture), and of course I like so much my job in astronomy. But I do not see many contacts between the two... This essentially because the aims of these two cultural approaches are the opposite: arts look deep inside the mind, and try to extract from that the beauty; sciences explore the universe outside man, they try to understand it and conquer it. Artistic beauty builds on misterious rules written inside the mind and soul, it is a communication based on such rules. Science and technology are based on totally different rules: the physics laws governing the external universe. Really I do not see much in common, apart from the fact that some spectacular images of HST (e.g. those of Galactic nebulae) are extraordinary beautiful paintings. One example clarifies my view: the efforts to synthesize music with mathematical and logical algorithms did not produce significant results, even pop music suffered very seriously from the use of computers."

"I am looking at this from the point of view of science, rather than technology, and I don’t think that the divide is so great. Maybe this view is too austere, but I think that intellectuals of both arts and science are there to illuminate their disciplines, in one case the human condition and in the other the environment in the broadest sense. I tried this opinion out on a painter friend who found it hilarious. She just liked to paint. Maybe I should have talked to a writer instead. Anyway, in my view we have a lot of common ground. Even the approaches are not always so far apart - there is plenty of informed intuition in the practice of physical science."

"My view of the ‘third culture’ is very similar to my view of the ‘third way’, a recent phenomenon in British politics: both are nice phrases but I’m not sure that as things stand either is backed up by much of substance. The unusual thing about C.P. Snow is that he was a scientist who turned to writing novels. In modern literature, particularly those by young to middle-aged British novelists, it is now common to invent characters set in scientific settings, or to use scientific, often astrophysical, allegories. Are these forays into the the third culture? If so, it seems a fair way from flourishing. In truth, I see no significantly greater divide between research in, say, astronomy and history, than between experimental physics and mathematics. The techniques may differ, but a key theme underlying all academic disciplines is the pursuit of understanding the ways in which things fit together. Amassing the knowledge and skills required to reach the forefront of research in any subject is extremely time-consuming, so that an individual has to be truly exceptional to master more than one in a lifetime. Perhaps, ‘the information’ is growing so fast that polymaths are a thing of the past, and we will see a spawning rather than a unification of intellectual cultures."

"I do not see any very clear evidence for such a bridging culture in the society around us. It is true that there is now an important technological culture, particularly noticeable in communications and information technology, which is neither scientific nor artistic in the sense which C.P. Snow would have understood. One could even, perhaps, argue that this culture is not intellectual at all. In my view each of these three cultures continues to use the products of the others, but there is rather little mutual understanding. Society seems to me to have become more compartmentalised, rather than less, since Snow’s time."