No doubt at some point during your undergraduate studies, you'll encounter the text of a lecture given in 1959 by British scientist-turned-novelist C.P. Snow, titled \The Two Cultures.""
Snow sparked controversy for positing something most college students take as an unspoken verity: Humanities people and science people are very different. So different, in fact, that they qualify as distinct, polarized cultures.
On the one hand you've got pot-smoking free spirits writing poems; on the other you've got Adderall-popping string theorists writing code.
Of course, Snow put it a bit more diplomatically. Between the two cultures, he said, lies ""a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes (particularly among the young) hostility and dislike, but most of all lack of understanding."" This makes dialogue across cultures all but impossible, and leaves humanity at large in a state worse than pitiful.
After reading Snow's speech, you may discuss the ample evidence of the two cultures' divide right here on campus like how history majors haven't seen Union South since SOAR. But admitting there are two cultures, to any extent, naturally leads to the question of which is better.
Following a warm, fuzzy, politically non-incendiary jaunt through Stephen J. Gould's non-overlapping magisteria theory of mutually non-threatening coexistence, some guy (because it's usually the men who have to prove to the room they're thinking by vocalizing??-there are studies on this one) will take the bait and toss out a less-than-flattering stereotype concerning the other culture's collective mind power.
Eventually, your class will settle for admitting the domains do differ, but it's due to entrenched styles of socialization and institutions, not anything innate to the material or machinists (and as Harvard President Lawrence Summers could likely testify, anyone who tosses such ideas out will be lambasted as a bigoted simpleton who should just shut up, expunge their statements from the intellectual record and crawl off to die in shame).
Rather frustrating and unsatisfying, yes, but according to Snow, there seems to be no bridge across the cultures. Not any Platonic conception of musical, mathematical harmony of the spheres;??not computers and their digital accoutrements providing a lexical nexus, not even that lovely fountain on Engineering Mall, though it was intended as ""a link between art and engineering.""
It's also inscribed with the words ""Descendant's Fountain,"" in part to honor the educational legacies of generations of UW-Madison students of all persuasions.
Too bad everyone involved neglected to call in the copy editors before etching that into stone, for as it's punctuated, that fountain belongs to one person. But perhaps that's part of the plan.
If so, it's a beautifully clever attempt at a symbolic bridge, but still a flawed one, like if the Human Ecology Building were to etch ""a2 + b2?? = 2c"" over the entrance. Nobody would notice, much less start communicating, because no one with an eye for such things would even see it.
But I personally guarantee if that fountain were on the east end of campus, it would have long ago been copy edited with red chalk. Or perhaps lipstick, depending on the levels of planning and mind-altering chemicals present. As it stands, it's just too far away.
