The Two Cultures debate: 3 incidents

C. P. Snow's problem: Why are scientists not considered intellectuals? Why are literary humanists entitled to such a label when virtually none of them know even the basics of sciences such as for example the second law of thermodynamics?  What will happen when the gap between the two cultures increases, because school children learn less and less science, and arrogant literati won't talk to the science community?

Part of Snow's problem lives on today in the separation of the faculties in institutions such as the university... On the other hand the demise of high (literary) culture that has characterized the postmodern period has lessened the gap between literary and scientific culture.

Lyotard's observation:  There are two separate types of knowledge (gnosis, Wissen, viden, savoir) - scientific knowledge which makes a claim to neutrality, adhering to straight-forward criteria of verification/falsification through hypothesis testing and experiments, and narrative knowledge which deals which the well-known, intuitive, traditional and customary rules we live by. Scientific knowledge which claims to be pure and value-free, in actuality depends on various grand narratives (Enlightenment, evolutionism, Freudianism, Marxism etc.) for its legitimation. As postmodernism has brought with it an incredulity towards meta-narratives science is left with no other recourse for legitimation than a narrative one. The stories that are told about scientific achievements are the only current way for science to legitimize its endeavours. Narrative knowledge has again become highly praised as the intuitive path to maintaining a sense of meaning and direction in peoples' lives, as all other grand teleological narratives have lost legitimizing power: Our beliefs in religious paradises or communist utopias (or indeed our belief in science as the path to a leisured life in peace and harmony) have vanished.

 As Lyotard's observation approaches its 30th anniversary its truth seems uncontested, but mankind's need for stories seem more pressing than ever as more and more people express themselves in new narrative forms (ranging from blogs to video testimonials) Might some of these little or local narratives at some point grow into new totalising grand naratives, as we become post-postmodern?

Sokal's problem: Sokal's hoax, where he ridicules the metaphorical discourse of poststructural thinkers such as Beaudrillard, Derrida, Irigaray, Lacan and Lyotard to show that for a scientist the physical world really exists and is not a social construction, can be seen as  a nostalgic harkening back to the two cultures division, now only in a radicalized form as a battle-grund between positivists and constructivists. Sokal refuses to let poststructuralists use the scientific discourses to legitimize  their constructivist theories which ultimately indicate that the physical world or at least our image of it (and stories about it) are as much conventions and constructions, as evidence and facts.

These three incidents set the stage for our work with scientific discourses in literature:

Sokal would obviously not appreciate novelistic treatments of science, especially not if the science is used as a metaphor for life and the problems characters might have in living it. So, the questions we might want to address include the following:

• How is scientific discourse legitimized in Einstein's Dreams? Is it a question of us understanding Einstein as a human being through his dreams (a standard narrative technique in fiction), or is it rather that we understand the world better through the thought experiments and possible worlds (inspired by hypothesis formation used in physics) which Einstein's dreams show us?
• How, specifically, are time and space represented in Einstein's Dreams? Harvey's ideas of space-time compression are of course metaphorical, since time and space have not changed in any physical sense, whereas our perception of them has: the world seems smaller and everything in it seems to have accelerated. However, we might still try to apply Harveys ideas to the novel, as Lightman in his capacity of being a postmodern writer uses his novel to experiment with the effects of space-time compression. Is his book perhaps best understood as a nostalgia for the days before the world accelerated out of control?
• Baudrillard speculates that the postmodern cultural world consists only of simulations and simulacra. Is it possible to regard the experiments with time in Einstein's Dreams as an attempt to find a 'real' (original) concept of time behind the many 'fantastic' (simulacra) concepts found in the dreams? Or does Lightman in fact agree with Baudrillard that one concept is as good as another, because none is more foundational/original than any other?