The Two Cultures C. P. Snow（查尔斯珀西 斯诺 Charles Percy Snow）作者：斯诺最值得人们注意的是他关于他“两种文化”这一概念的讲演与书籍。这一概念在他的两种文化与科学变革（The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution，1959年出版）。在这本书中，斯诺注意到科学与人文中联系的中断对解决世界上的问题是一个主要障碍。斯诺特别提到如今世界上教育的质量正在逐步地降低。比如说，很多科学家从未读过查尔斯狄更斯的作品，同样，艺术工作者对科学也同样的不熟悉。他写道：斯诺的演讲在发表之时引起了很多的骚动，一部分原因是他在陈述观点时不愿妥协的态度。他被文学评论家 FR利维斯（F. R. Leavis）强烈地抨击。这一激烈的争辩甚至使夫兰达斯与史旺创作了一首主题是热力学第一与第二定律的喜剧歌曲，并起名为第一与第二定律（First and Second Law）。斯诺写到：斯诺同时注意到了另一个分化，即富国与穷国之间的分化。1 “Its rather odd,” said G. H. Hardy, one afternoon in the early Thirties, “but when we hear about intellectuals nowadays, it doesnt include people like me and J. J. Thomson and Rutherford.” Hardy was the first mathematician of his generation, J. J. Thomson the first physicist of his; as for Rutherford, he was one of the greatest scientists who have ever lived. Some bright young literary person (I forget the exact context) putting them outside the enclosure reserved for intellectuals seemed to Hardy the best joke for some time. It does not seem quite such a good joke now. The separation between the two cultures has been getting deeper under our eyes; there is now precious little communication between them, little but different kinds of incomprehension1 and dislike.2 The traditional culture, which is, of course, mainly literary, is behaving like a state whose power is rapidly decliningstanding on its precarious2 dignity, spending far too much energy on Alexandrian intricacies, 1 occasionally letting fly in fits of aggressive pique3 quite beyond its means, 2 too much on the defensive4 to show any generous imagination to the forces, which must inevitably reshape it. Whereas the scientific culture is expansive, not restrictive, confident at the roots, the more confident after its bout5 of Oppenheimerian self-criticism, certain that history is on its side, impatient, intolerant, and creative rather than critical, good-natured and brash6. Neither culture knows the virtues of the other; often it seems they deliberately do not want to know. 3 The resentment, which the traditional culture feels for the scientific, is shaded with fear; from the other side, the resentment is not shaded so much as brimming7 with irritation. When scientists are faced with an expression of the traditional culture, it tends (to borrow Mr. William Coopers eloquent phrase) to make their feet ache. 3 It does not need saying that 4generalizations of this kind are bound to look silly at the edges. There are a good many scientists indistinguishable from literary persons, and vice versa. Even the stereotype generalizations about scientists are misleading without some sort of detaile.g., the generalization that scientists as a group stand on the political Left. This is only partly true. A very high proportion of engineers is almost as conservative as doctors; of pure scientists; the same would apply to chemists. It is only among physicists and biologists that one finds the Left in strength. If one compared the whole body of scientists with their opposite numbers of the traditional culture (writers, academics, and so on), the total result might be a few per cent, more towards the Left wing, but not more than that. 5Nevertheless, as a first approximation, the scientific culture is real enough, and so is its difference from the traditional. For anyone like myself, by education a scientist, by calling a writer, at one time moving between groups of scientists and writers in the same evening, the difference has seemed dramatic. 4 The first thing, impossible to miss, is that scientists are on the up and up; they have the strength of a social force behind them. If they are English, they share the experience common to us allof being in a country sliding economically downhillbut in addition (and to many of them it seems psychologically more important) they belong to something more than a profession, to something more like a directing class of a new society. 6In a sense oddly divorced from politics, they are the new men. Even the steadiest and most politically conservative of scientific veterans, 7 lurking8 in dignity in their colleges, has some kind of link with the world to come. They do not hate it as their colleagues do; part of their mind is open to it; 8almost against their will, there is a residual glimmer of kinship there. The young English scientists may and do curse their luck; increasingly they fret9 about the rigidities of their universities, about the ossification10 of the traditional culture which, to the scientists, makes the universities cold and dead; they violently envy their Russian counterparts who have money and equipment without discernible11 limit, who have the whole field wide open. But still they stay pretty resilient12: the same social force sweeps them on. Harwell and Winscale have just as much spirit as Los Alamos and Chalk River: the neat petty bourgeois houses, the tough and clever young, the crowds of children: they are symbols, frontie