2.2.1 Much of the discussion concerning the triangle of art, science, and technology can be traced back to CP Snow's famous annual Rede lecture at Cambridge on May 7th, 1959. The phrase 'Two Cultures' entered into a cultural controversy and debate that has endured remarkably long. The title of Lord Snow's lecture was "The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution." He identified the two cultures as the literary intellectuals and the natural sciences, and he pointed to the curricula of schools and universities as the source of the problem. In the Introduction to Snow's book, Stephan Collini gives a historical perspective to this divide by locating its beginning in the Romantic Period, at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries. (Snow, 1964, pg. xii) He traces the British genealogy of 'Two Cultures' anxiety in the linguistic peculiarity by which the term 'science' came to be used in a narrowed sense to refer to just the 'physical' or 'natural' sciences.

2.2.2 The compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary recognised that this was a fairly recent development, with no example given before the 1860's: "We shall . . . use the word "science" in the sense which the Englishmen so commonly give it; as expressing physical and experimental science, to the exclusion of theological and metaphysical." (Snow, 1964 pg. xi) William Whewell, a philosopher and historian of science who used 'science' in his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences of 1840, is credited with establishing this term. The first time it was recorded as an idea, however, was at the Association for the Advanced Science in the early 1830's when it was proposed as an analogy to the term 'artist.' Yet, the two cultures refer to the divide between the literary humanities and frequently exclude what was originally the analogy to science-art.

2.2.3 The idea of 'Two Cultures' was a great source of fame for Snow in the 1960's. He received twenty honorary degrees in the course of the decade and, following the Labour Party's election in October 1964, accepted Harold Wilson's invitation to become the second-in-command at the newly established Ministry of Technology, becoming the government spokesman on Technology in the House of the Lords. From 1966 until his death in 1980, much like Fuller, Snow travelled the world as a lecturer, adviser, and public sage. [top]