and lovers of the outdoors and the arts. These are the very qualities that typically motivate their interest in science—the exploration of creation—to begin with. But very little of that characteristic passion and curiosity would be communicated to the general public for the next fifty years. Science came to be regarded as a culture of monks: intellectual, quietly cloistered, sexually and creatively dry.
With tax money pouring in from a vastly expanding economy and the public respect afforded the authority of the white lab coat, two generations of scientists instead had only to impress their own university departments and government agencies to keep research funds coming their way. But they no longer had to impress the public, which was growing increasingly mistrustful of science.
At the same time, science was becoming less accessible even to other scientists. As knowledge mounted and research became increasingly specialized, no one could keep up with all the latest findings. There was simply too much information. With scientists unable to follow each other outside their own fields, reaching out to the public seemed a hopeless exercise. What mattered was not process, but results. University tenure tracks rewarded the scientists who had successful research programs and multiple professional publications that attracted large sustaining grants, which, in turn, attracted and funded the top graduate students. But tenure gave no similar consideration to science communication or public outreach. “Those who can, do,” the attitude of scientists became, “and those who can’t, teach.” It was a horrible mistake.
Locked in a subculture of competitive, smart, and passionate people focused on their own research, scientists forgot that they were responsible to—indeed, a part of—the community of taxpayers that funded much of their work and so deserved a say in what they did. Scientists became notoriously cheap donors of both time and money, and withdrew from civic life in other ways. Giving back and participating in the greater civic dialog just wasn’t part of their culture or value system. As in any cloistered society, attitudes of superiority developed within the science community—attitudes that ran counter to the fundamentally antiauthoritarian nature of scientific inquiry.
Many scientists, for example, came to view politics as something dirty and beneath them. Arguing that they did not want to risk their objectivity, they eschewed voicing opinions on political issues. So while science was entering its most dizzyingly productive and politically relevant period yet, very little of this creativity was being relayed to the public. Only the results were publicized. From the public’s perspective, the science community had largely withdrawn into its ivory tower and gone silent. This proved to be a disaster.
Public Sentiment Is Everything
In democracy, there is a mistaken idea that politics is the lowly part of the business—what we have to put up with in order to enact policy—but, in fact, the opposite is true. This mistake is made especially often by scientists, who view politics as tainted. Abraham Lincoln eloquently illustrated this point when he debated his opponent Stephen Douglas in the 1858 Illinois campaign for the US Senate. Lincoln lost that election, but he forced Douglas to explain his position on slavery in a way that alienated the Southern Democrats. That set Lincoln up to defeat him in the race for president two years later.
“Public sentiment,” Lincoln said, “is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed. Consequently he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions. He makes statutes and decisions possible or impossible to be executed.”
Thus politics, which moves the invisible hand of democracy, is more important than policy. It reflects and shapes the will of the people. It is the foundation on which policy is based. Lincoln’s thinking in this regard echoed that of Thomas Jefferson. It was also a view that industry would soon adopt with a vengeance.
Scientists were certainly smart enough to realize this, but the structure put in place under Vannevar Bush’s grand vision worked against it. Who now had to worry about shaping public sentiment? As president of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, Bush was familiar with the time and resources that fund-raising required, and his goal was to lift the onus of obtaining research funding off scientists and universities to propel the nation forward in a more coordinated way. Other nations—both East and West—quickly followed suit. But the need to sell the worth of one’s work to the public and donors, to converse about new discoveries and their meaning, and to inspire and excite lay-people may be the only thing that keeps the public invested and supportive in the long term—support that, in a democracy, is critical to sustained effort. Bush may have done his job too well. The shift to public funding changed the incentive structure in science.
This might not have been a problem if scientists had valued public outreach, but, by and large, they didn’t. As economists are quick to point out, people often adjust their behavior to maximize the benefit to themselves in any given transaction, and the economics of the new structure rewarded research but not public outreach or engagement. As a result, most scientists ignored it. Science coasted off the taxpayers’ fear of the USSR, even as public mistrust was building.
The Two Cultures
The growing divide between science and mainstream culture was famously articulated by British physicist, novelist, and science advisor C. P. Snow, a man who straddled many worlds, like the scientist/artist/statesmen of old. In a famous 1959 lecture titled “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” Snow warned that the widening communication gulf between the sciences and the humanities threatened the ability of modern peoples to solve their problems:
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: “Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?”
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question—such as, “What do you mean by mass, or acceleration,” which is the scientific equivalent of saying, “Can you read?”—not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the Western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
Scientists didn’t see this as a warning or an invitation to reach out; rather, they viewed it as a criticism of the willful ignorance and snobbishness of those practicing the humanities. To a certain extent, their view was justified: intellectuals weren’t giving their work its due. The fast-growing importance of the sciences was garnering scientists considerable funding and public regard in exchange for the new powers and freedoms they were giving society. Yet that same society’s highbrows, especially in academia, still refused to acknowledge their work’s significance.
But the threat of nuclear war made survival the priority and relegated other important things to the realm of luxuries. Suddenly, citizens didn’t have the luxury of indulging wonder, or the humanities, to the extent they once had. And science had adeptly proven its utility to society, as Snow argued. Although he criticized scientists who could scarcely make their way through Dickens with any understanding of its subtleties, he saved his harshest criticism for British universities—which had underfunded the sciences to the benefit of the humanities, despite the former’s contributions—and for the snobbishness of literary intellectuals. “If the scientists have the future in their bones,” he said, “then the traditional culture responds by wishing the future did not exist.” It was a statement that could just as easily describe the US Congress, or the Canadian parliament, some fifty years later.
The lecture was printed in book form and widely debated in Britain, as well as in Canada and the United States. It has been declared one of the one hundred most influential Western books of the last half of the twentieth century.
For a solution, Snow envisioned the emergence of a third culture of people schooled in both the sciences and the humanities. But that is not what took place. A great change had begun in Western universities,