Increasingly it is historians who have the answers in science

The bipolarity of science and the humanities has always been a false and inhibiting distinction. Now the enmity between what C.P. Snow called ‘the Two Cultures’ is coming to an end. It has lasted 200 years. Before that, knowledge was seen as a whole, a continuum. A seer like Newton probed into all subjects, albeit physics interested him most. His friend Christopher Wren was a mathematician-scientist before he concentrated on architecture. Their colleagues in the Royal Society discussed all topics. When Diderot was compiling his Encyclopédie, he drew no frontiers between arts and sciences. As late as the year 1800, Humphry Davy, Coleridge and Wordsworth formed a trio of creators and truth-seekers working in amity rather than as strangers glaring at each other uncomprehendingly across a disciplinary fence. Davy wrote poetry. At his Bristol laboratory, he and Coleridge planned ‘to attack chemistry like a shark’.

The bifurcation came in the 1820s when the increasing complexities of the physical sciences and their arcane vernacular deterred most literary men from following them. There was a sad moment at Lowther Castle in 1827 when Wordsworth and Davy met for the last time, Wordsworth complaining in a letter that they were no longer kindred spirits. ‘His scientific pursuits have hurried him into a course where I could no longer follow him, and have diverted it in proportion from objects with which I was best acquainted.’ The expansion and professionalisation of the universities accelerated the process of dividing knowledge into separate disciplines — a horrible word denoting rigidity and intolerance — each dominated by its own ‘experts’. The mutual incompatibility of such expertise both sanctified and envenomed the cultural clash.

In the 20th century, those who tried to move at will between one sector of knowledge and another were repudiated by their own communities (another term which came into vogue).