The two cultures business - arts versus science - resurfaces every so often. Now is one of those times.
The argument makes four assumptions. One, that two cultures exist. Two, that important discussion takes place within each. Three, that there is mutual incomprehension between the cultures. Four, that such lack of understanding matters. All four assumptions might be politely described as questionable
An arts culture exists I grant. It consist I take it, of basic knowledge that in large measure every cultured person must possess. We will have read the same books, listened to the same music, attended the same plays, looked at the same pictures. Even if our views are unconventional we will know what is accepted. If we do not rate Dickens highly we will have read enough to be able to say why. Sir Kenneth Clark was a truly cultured fellow; keeper of fine art at the Ashmolean, director of the National Gallery, Slade professor of fine art, chairman of the Arts Council, author of the acclaimed television series Civilisation- and privately wealthy. Yes I know what culture means with the arts
But I cannot come up with a similar list for science nor a scientific Sir Kenneth; there is no body of scientific knowledge that every scientist worthy of the name would know. C P Snow’s test question was the 2nd law of thermodynamics but there is no reason for a marine biologist to understand entropy and probably few do. I can fairly claim to be a scientist; at least I have been paid as one and I have had a good number of research papers published. The most wide ranging scientific publication is Nature but I cannot understand even the titles of most of the articles. There is basic science that everyone ought to know but that is more like being able to read and write, it does not constitute a culture. There is no accepted, permanent scientific canon.
The arts and the sciences are very different creatures. The arts change relatively slowly and despite claimed revolutions essentially by addition; at least the new does not make the old redundant. Monet does not supplant Michelangelo. Science changes ever more rapidly and in large measure by the new displacing the old. The arts seek a comprehensive view. Science is overwhelmingly about singular findings; some have wide implications, most have not. Science is about being first. But van Gogh did not rush to finish “Sunflowers” in case someone beat him to it. The arts illuminate human nature and there in large measure only the context changes. Shakespeare has not been superseded in the way that Newton has. Science deals primarily with the physical world and there our knowledge is increasing all the time. To understand the new we need to know where we are, and that is simply not feasible for one person in every branch of science. A cultured person we would expect to be capable of comprehending articles in the London Review of Books; I can manage that. To find a comprehensible account of recent findings in science we have to turn to New Scientist and the like. New Scientist is popular science; nothing wrong with that but no one would claim that its readers were scientifically cultured, what ever that might mean. I do not read New Scientist and I doubt many scientists do. It is Boys Own science. To be versed in the arts culture you do not have to be a practitioner, Sir Kenneth was cultured and Tracy Emin I would guess is not. But if there were a science culture it would be one for scientists not just for aficionados of science.
During the 17th, 18th and even the 19th Centuries it was normal- and possible - for an intelligent man to be interested in science. But that was overall a period of optimism and a belief in progress, and progress meant science. We no longer believe in progress and we no longer believe science always to be a good thing. I think though that the split started with the romantics, with the cult of nature contrasted with the “dark satanic mills”, and with Rousseau and the primitive , and with the revival of the notion of a ruling clerisy. But the divide is now more pronounced and that is chiefly because there is vastly more science. No one can now know about :”science” in the way that a person can still know about the arts.
What then do the artistically cultured discuss?I have not been lucky enough to sit at high table at an Oxford College but I have a feeling the talk would be as often as not of holiday plans and and the difficulty of getting a plumber. i have known many scientists, several of eminence, but I cannot recall ever having had a discussion about “science”. Of course we have had discussions about particular items of research - at times. But there is as much secretiveness as frank exchange, and as much deviousness as openness. As Tom Lehrer has it, the secret of research is- plagiarise.
Mutual incomprehension between the arts graduate and the scientist is then to overstate matters. At most or at worst, those who claim to be cultured may look down on the uncultured scientist and the scientist may resent that. Such a patronising attitude is childish and I suspect cloaks a feeling of inferiority. So often you hear an educated person boasts that, “I was hopeless at mathematics!” In itself this is trivial. It is though important since it influenced the way matters outside the two cultures business are handled, matters that affect us all.
What lies outside or perhaps between the arts and the sciences might be crudely split into philosophy and religion on the one hand, and ethics, politics and society on the other. Some fundamental scientific concepts do indeed have philosophical and theological importance; natural selection, entropy, the uncertainty principle, randomness, the big bang, black holes, the size of the universe for example. It is difficult to see where a personal god fits in. There is in the other direction the philosophy of science and the theory of knowledge. But neither set is of relevance for the vast majority of practising scientists. Some scientists do become interested in such matters- usually ones past their most productive period- even when outside their own field. If all this is the core of a scientific culture, it is a culture that excludes most scientists. It is by the way what occupies the popularisers of science; the Dawkins and Pinkers and Jones’s.
The science that does occupy most practising scientists matters a great deal to the man on the Clapham omnibus. Governments, even dictatorships, are susceptible to public pressure especially on environmental matters. Governments and special interest groups attempt to influence public opinion. In many instances the case put to the public depends on the actual or believed science. Am I as a scientist in a better position than a non scientist to spot the dodgy case? Not necessarily. You may recall the Brent Spa, an obsolete oil-rig that Shell wished to dump in deep water. That scheme caused a public outcry, orchestrated by environmental pressure groups, a large dent in Shell’s German sales, and a climb- down by both the company and the government. The rig lay for years rusting away in a Norwegian fiord. My first degree was in Geography so I have a passing acquaintance with oceanography. But all one needs to know is that the ocean is a big place and that nothing much goes on in most of its deeper parts. No one now doubts that sinking in deep water would have been a safe solution. Sinking in shallow water might have been even better, providing a haven for fish safe from marauding trawlers. Wrecks have since been sunk for that purpose.
What basic science should everyone know - including scientists? A few suggestions. It would be helpful if everyone realised how science works. Ideally any scientific statement should be testable and the test, repeatable. For that the test must occur in what I call arbitrary time, time that can start now, whenever “now” is. I say ideally since science does stray into the non repeatable - events that take place in historical time - but that is “soft” science. Authority and consensus is irrelevant in hard science, and in soft science should be limited to those scientists who have studied the problem. So it would be useful if everyone realised the limitations of the expertise of every scientist. No one would expect an astrophysicist to know about foot-and-mouth in cattle but in practice we accept the authority of scientists pronouncing in fields about which they know nothing. The original B S E committee was chaired by the late Dick Southwood - an insect physiologist- with no member who knew anything about spongiform encephalopathy. The government’s Chief Scientist has pronounced of late on animal research, carbon trading, the sale of suspect turkey meat and flooding, as well as, of course, on climate change, although Sir David King - estimable fellow no doubt -is a chemist. His views on global warming are worth no more than mine - probably rather less.
Of course basic science will not allow you to judge the merits of every case but it might get you further than you might suppose, as my Brent Spa example shows. The vexed and vital question of the moment is global warming. Anyone who gives the matter passing thought will recognise that there are two questions; has the world got warmer and are greenhouse gases to blame? There is no reason to doubt the former, short of some global conspiracy to suppress the truth. Anyone with basic physics will understand the greenhouse effect; that is hard science. But that does not mean the increase in global temperature must nave been caused by atmospheric carbon dioxide and some other gases. We accept that it is so caused, because scientists assure us such is the case, or to it more grandly, that is the consensus of informed scientific opinion. Before we look at which scientists are saying what, can we with our school-boy science get a little further? First of all, is there an experiment to test whether greenhouse gases are causing the world to get warmer? The answer is of course “no”. We cannot even as with smoking and lung cancer, look at “worlds” that have reduced carbon dioxide. Certainly both temperature and greenhouse gases have increased. But that is simply a correlation. School-boy science ought to include enough statistics for everyone to know that a correlation does not necessarily mean a causal connection; ought to but probably doesn’t. The classic example is the correlation between nesting stork and number of children per household in Sweden - stork do not bring babies. The greenhouse gas business occurs in historical time, it is “soft” science. Most people if they could be bothered to consider the matter, would arrive at the conclusion that the only real evidence for the greenhouse gas effect is the computer models linking gas levels to global mean temperature. How do these work and are they any good; have the model results been close to the “actual” temperature in the past? That is where our school-boy science runs out but we have come a fair way. We now know the vital question to ask.
Which scientists should we trust to answer this question? Obviously the scientists who have looked at the relationship between model outputs and temperature estimates based on measurements. I do not know who those scientists are or who they might be - certainly not the consensus that is so often cited. Whoever they may be, they are adopting a low profile. Nor do those understandably worried about climate change refer to them. I find that all very odd since the models are the key evidence that man is engineering disaster.
I fear I have come some way from the “two cultures” but that is because science is not a culture, although science is very important. The arts is a culture but not one that seems to me to matter greatly. The whole business started with C P Snow and the Oxford dons and there it has largely remained - and a very suitable place too.
P Symmons Aug 2007