In a 1959 lecture, the British physicist and novelist C. P. Snow admonished his Cambridge colleagues that “the intellectual life of the whole of western society is increasingly being split into two polar groups.” Snow was referring to the divide between scholars of science and the humanities, complaining that “literary intellectuals” and “physical scientists” didn’t understand or respect each other. Fast-forward 62 years and the situation has only gotten worse, aggravated by further entrenchment, a decrease in the number of students majoring in the humanities, and a series of global challenges that call for a creative confluence of different types of knowledge.
In my new book, Great Minds Don’t Think Alike, I document conversations I had with leading thinkers who bridge the gap between the sciences and the humanities.
The meteoric growth of many fields of scientific knowledge in the past three centuries has led to a model of niche-knowledge. ...
