A jubilee without jubilation
In reality it is summer. In a sense, though, it still is winter. And what a winter of snow. And the earnestly-awaited thaw has yet to come.
Admittedly obscured by such fireworks as the International Astronomy Year (celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galilean telescopics and Kepler's Astronomia Nova) and the Darwin Year (200th anniversary of his birth and 150th, that of The Origin), the golden jubilee of Snow's sparkle still shines. On May 7, 1959, British physicist cum novelist Charles Percy Snow delivered the annual Rede Lecture in the Senate House of the University of Cambridge, entitled "The two cultures and the scientific revolution", in which he observed a breakdown of communication between two pillars of modern society - literary intellectuals and natural scientists - owing to a developing ipsilateral chauvinism on both sides who tended to be willfully ignorant of each other, and the dire consequence of this damaging rift: an obstacle to scientific progress culminating to a threat to the survival of civilization.
Yet while that summer firework is winning almost universal appreciation, this sparkle of a winter candlelight is losing even the accommodation of our lens (and mind). And truly, who cares to take up a shovel in this misty chilling dawn when snowflakes of scientific papers are piling up at practically the speed of light?
Well, us - if only after a night span's thought. There are beautiful transparent flakes so complicated in their factual crystal structure that is hard for us to discern. There are dirty murky flakes so contaminated by lack of rigor that they are hard for us to palate. But no matter what. Even if there's not a shovel, bet on our bare hands.
As Snow opined on modern physics: "the majority of the cleverest people [...] would have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had...", fifty years on, what was one single prong-less bone in the eyes of literary intellectuals called "natural science" has grown into a whole skeleton of scientific sub-specialties that is ever more daunting to tackle [see the preface of this blog]. It has transpired since then that nothing less than the consorted effort of all walks of scientists is necessary to clear the snowflakes of Snow.
Let's be the first! Even if we're only as knowledgeable as our forefathers in the neolithic, we still have the Acheulian know-how to strike a flint stone!
Let's light our candles! For in the darkest of humanity's night, while wondering under the firework-lit sky, my childhood motto slowly crawled back to my mind:
Lamvelanders get things done.
And I know that the snow of Snow did not fall in Lamveland. Smile...
Note: see also royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=8372 for perspectives on both sides of the iron curtain.
In reality it is summer. In a sense, though, it still is winter. And what a winter of snow. And the earnestly-awaited thaw has yet to come.
Admittedly obscured by such fireworks as the International Astronomy Year (celebrating the 400th anniversary of Galilean telescopics and Kepler's Astronomia Nova) and the Darwin Year (200th anniversary of his birth and 150th, that of The Origin), the golden jubilee of Snow's sparkle still shines. On May 7, 1959, British physicist cum novelist Charles Percy Snow delivered the annual Rede Lecture in the Senate House of the University of Cambridge, entitled "The two cultures and the scientific revolution", in which he observed a breakdown of communication between two pillars of modern society - literary intellectuals and natural scientists - owing to a developing ipsilateral chauvinism on both sides who tended to be willfully ignorant of each other, and the dire consequence of this damaging rift: an obstacle to scientific progress culminating to a threat to the survival of civilization.
Yet while that summer firework is winning almost universal appreciation, this sparkle of a winter candlelight is losing even the accommodation of our lens (and mind). And truly, who cares to take up a shovel in this misty chilling dawn when snowflakes of scientific papers are piling up at practically the speed of light?
Well, us - if only after a night span's thought. There are beautiful transparent flakes so complicated in their factual crystal structure that is hard for us to discern. There are dirty murky flakes so contaminated by lack of rigor that they are hard for us to palate. But no matter what. Even if there's not a shovel, bet on our bare hands.
As Snow opined on modern physics: "the majority of the cleverest people [...] would have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had...", fifty years on, what was one single prong-less bone in the eyes of literary intellectuals called "natural science" has grown into a whole skeleton of scientific sub-specialties that is ever more daunting to tackle [see the preface of this blog]. It has transpired since then that nothing less than the consorted effort of all walks of scientists is necessary to clear the snowflakes of Snow.
Let's be the first! Even if we're only as knowledgeable as our forefathers in the neolithic, we still have the Acheulian know-how to strike a flint stone!
Let's light our candles! For in the darkest of humanity's night, while wondering under the firework-lit sky, my childhood motto slowly crawled back to my mind:
Lamvelanders get things done.
And I know that the snow of Snow did not fall in Lamveland. Smile...
Note: see also royalsociety.org/page.asp?id=8372 for perspectives on both sides of the iron curtain.
