In hmolscience, Snowed refers to one of the two cultures, intellectuals of the science or the humanities, attending (Scott, 1985) a meeting, class, or conference of another culture and, therein, being completely "lost", or having ideas go "over one's head", as to what the other culture is saying.
Overview
On 7 May 1959, Charles Snow, in his talk “The Two Cultures”, a Rede Lecture given at Cambridge, presented a thesis according to which science and the humanities, which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society", had become split into "two cultures" and that this division was a major handicap to both in solving the world's problems; the following is the most-cited quote from the lecture: [1]
“A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice, I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the second law of thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet, I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?”
The lecture was published as 51-page booklet entitled The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (1959) and later expanded into a larger 107-page The Two Cultures: and a Second Look: an Expanded Version of The Two Cultures (1965); both of which having gone on to stimulate several other books on the same subject. [2]
In 1974, George Scott, an American physical chemist, as he explains in his 1985 chapter “Snowdrifts in the Heart of Texas”, a play on Snow’s “two cultures” theory, having headed a NSF-funded “two cultures” thematic “summer program” at the University of South Dakota, from 1959 to 1969, and having taught a two-cultures themed course, called “Disorder in Nature and Human Affairs”, at USD, with social psychologist George Breed, was on sabbatical for a year at the University of Texas, attempting to pen a two cultures unifying book, entitled Atoms of the Living Flame: an Odyssey into the Ethics and the Physical Chemistry of Free Will, themed around
“One day, I got up the courage and slipped into one of Prigogine’s classes. Unfortunately, I could only sit in a daze while he covered all the blackboards with strange math. This time, it was I who was completely ‘Snowed’, pun very deliberate. I understood just enough to realize I was going to have to come to grips with it sooner or later, but the only thing I was able to do that spring was procrastinate, and I kept it up for nearly four years, by which time Prigogine had won his Nobel Prize, before I began to really wrestle with the essential translation of his very exciting science for his new book.”
— George Scott (1985), Atoms of the Living Flame (pg. 139) [3]
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See also
● Jabberwocky | Lotkean Jabberwocky | Lotka (1925)
● Anthropism | Sherrington (1938)
● Langism | Lang (1956)
● Sokalism | Elias (1958)
● Toolism | Handtke (2013)
References
1. Snow, Charles P. (1959). The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution (second law, pg 16). Cambridge University Press.
2. Slade, Joseph W. (1990). Beyond Two Cultures: Essays on Science, Technology, and Literature, (ch. 1: "Observer and Object, Reader and Text: Some Parallel Themes in Modern Science and Literature" by Jeremy Campbell, pgs. 23-37; Stephen Brush on thermodynamics and literature, pg. 24; ch. 9: "Entropy as Root Metaphor", by Eric Zencey, pgs. 185-200; entropism, pg. 194). Iowa State University Press.
3. Scott, George P. (1985). Atoms of the Living Flame: an Odyssey into Ethics and the Physical Chemistry of Free Will (thermodynamics, pgs. 181-84; ubiquitous quote: pg. 265). University Press of America.
External links
● The Two Cultures – Wikipedia.
