The Straggler: Blinding Science

N AT I O N A L R E V I E W/J U LY 4, 2005

When I was a little more than my son’s present age there was much talk about the Two Cultures, following C. P. Snow’s famous 1956 essay. Not having arrived at any worldly understanding by that point, and having just read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, I picked up a vague notion that the human species was splitting into two, a development whose end result would see languid literary intellectuals in velvet jackets, smoking Gauloises and perhaps drinking absinthe, discussing Boileau and Virginia Woolf in the upper world, while technicians in lab coats toiled away in underground caverns to supply these cultivated loungers with medicines and gadgets.

About the Author

John Derbyshire

Mr. Derbyshire is a former contributing editor of National Review.

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N AT I O N A L R E V I E W/J U LY 4, 2005

When I was a little more than my son’s present age there was much talk about the Two Cultures, following C. P. Snow’s famous 1956 essay. Not having arrived at any worldly understanding by that point, and having just read H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, I picked up a vague notion that the human species was splitting into two, a development whose end result would see languid literary intellectuals in velvet jackets, smoking Gauloises and perhaps drinking absinthe, discussing Boileau and Virginia Woolf in the upper world, while technicians in lab coats toiled away in underground caverns to supply these cultivated loungers with medicines and gadgets.