"A clash of doctrines is not a disaster, it is an opportunity." A. N. Whitehead
RANDOM QUESTIONS ON THE THIRD CULTURE
  1. It is often said that without Mozart we would not have had "The Marriage of Figaro", that without Picasso we would not have had "Guernica", but that geometry would have been discovered without Euclid and relativity would have been discovered without Einstein. Even for the same author, say Mozart, the production of the composer and violinist is considered to have a different status than his (not less famous) treatise on violin playing, Versuch einer grundlichen Violinschule, 1756. Is there anything special about the art production which makes it no repeatable? Has the language of art a different complexity than the science language?
  2. How come that more and more scientists enjoy the arts, but still very few artists are familiar with the basics of science? (Recall Snow's story (in his famous The Two Cultures: and A Second Look, Cambridge University Press, 1965, p.3) ending with Cambridge President remark: "Oh, those are mathematicians! We never talk to them.")
  3. What is the position of religion in this picture?
  4. Is any real change in the current meaning of the word "intellectual" from, say 1930s (when G. H. Hardy, one of the greatest mathematicians in Britain observed that "There seems to be a new definition which certainly doesn't include Rutherford or Eddington or Dirac ...")?
  5. What about the word "culture", a concept first explicitly defined in 1871 by the British anthropologist Edward B. Tylor to refer to "that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society"?
  6. In another sense, the concept of culture describes a highly cultivated person who is versed in music, literature, philosophy, and other intellectual pursuits associated with civilized life. Is "science" an "intellectual pursuit"?
  7. Is mathematics a science? Is computer science a science?
  8. Are sciences too simplistic by comparison with arts? (Recall B. Russell saying that "every man has a mother but mankind does not have a mother".)
  9. What is the difference between a "theorem" and a "poem"?
  10. Could the computer be the "magic" key to bring the two cultures together?