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'The Two Cultures' seem to be coming together

By Carl Heintze

When I started college, I found the world divided into two parts: engineers and everyone else.

The engineers started with all the rest of us, but they soon went off on their own track. They took courses like "fluid mechanics" and "calculus." They carried slide rules like a set of car keys (this was college in the days before computers).

I was busy with such subjects as "Victorian poetry" and "political science 1." I wrote essays. I read the great novels of the past and listened to lectures about the great art of the 20th century.

They were busy compiling rows of impenetrable figures and speaking a language I did not understand, an incomprehensible jargon of phrases, formulas and graphs, equations and other arcane emblems of a technology beyond me.

They didn't have any electives--almost every course they took was required. The rest of us spread our choices across the academic map. I remember I took such useful subjects as "totalitarianism" (in those days a contemporary problem) and "economics 1."

No matter what we took, eventually we all graduated and went out into the real world.

The engineers were better equipped than I was for that experience. All they had to do was put their slide rules to work. I wandered around for a while and eventually went to graduate school, in part to postpone having to go work a little longer, in part because I needed some training in something in order to get a job.

My choice was journalism--in those days a much more paper and pencil job than it is today--and in a year of graduate study I learned enough practical knowledge to become a newspaper reporter.

Much later I went back to school again, this time to gather some knowledge about the sciences so I could write about them with some understanding.

I'm not sure which way was the right way, and now it probably doesn't matter. But I remain fascinated by the differences in education I got as an undergraduate from that taught to engineers.

And as luck would have it, two of my longtime good friends turned out to be engineers. Over the years I've found they don't know much about literature, music or the arts. On the other hand, I don't know much about the second law of thermodynamics.

We've sort of re-educated one another, a kind of haphazard education at best.

I bring all this up because it's an example of what the late C.P. Snow, English novelist and scientist, called "The Two Cultures." Snow's thesis, about which he wrote several books, is that Western civilization is developing two trains of thought. One's technology and all its related disciplines. The other is what, for lack of a better name, I'll call the liberal arts: literature, music and art.

In Snow's day, and maybe even now, the two different paths seem to be diverging and growing ever farther apart.

In Silicon Valley, where I've spent most of my life, it's clear that technology has gained the upper hand. In this part of the country, engineers are more numerous than poets or philosophers.

And even a writer has to know something about a computer. He sits in front of one most of the day banging on its keyboard.

I suppose the melding of the two branches of knowledge here is because the dotcom revolution was born here, but it also is because technology has become of ever-increasing importance both to engineers and to those who practice the liberal arts.

And like Lord Snow, it seems to me that bringing the two branches of knowledge ever closer to one another is necessary in order to make the world go. We need engineers to make our machines continue to function, but we also need writers, poets, musicians and artists to make the world a place in which we enjoy living.

There is a beauty in an equation that works the way it is supposed to, just as the computer these days can generate such things as Mandelbaum fractals that show the true beauty of mathematical relationships.

But I suppose there are some shades of the spectrum of knowledge that will always remain where they are. Dissecting a beautiful sunrise or sunset, finding out the relationship between its gases, light particles and so on doesn't make it any more beautiful. Its essence may only be grasped with a poem.

Figuring out how to make a more efficient automobile engine doesn't necessarily make the world a more beautiful place, even though it may help save some of its beauty from consumption.

The Two Cultures need to and may be becoming one. And that's good.