Intellectual entropy. A few weeks ago, when I went back to Dallas for the holiday break, I read a book by C. P. Snow called The Two Cultures. It's a rather (in)famous book, in which Snow posits that the bulk of intelligent people fall into one of two broadly defined cultures: the "intellectuals," and the "scientific" types ^(†).

In the mind of Snow, intellectuals have read Kant, Goethe, Shakespeare, Dante, etc., and are exquisitely familiar with The Human Condition. Scientists and engineers, on the other hand, understand nature and the universe in a profoundly real way, but prefer to leave for others exploration of the noetic life. His primary criticism was that these two cultures barely communicate, and each sadly ignores what the other group has to offer. This idea set off a firestorm of debate in the 50's and 60's after Snow gave the lecture at Cambridge.

One of Snow's more famous lines is repeated below:

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?'

Although he's definitely over the bounds of polite speech, Snow touches on something that frustrates many scientists: the failure of intelligent people to learn the bare minimum about the behavior of nature. The three laws of thermodynamics really are about the only laws that exist for all of science.... (for those not familiar, Wikipedia does a good job of summarizing).

Speaking about ignorance of the second law, I came across this statement from the Governor of South Carolina—a man endowed with the chief executive office of a state—being asked about his thoughts on "intelligent design:"

Well I think that it's just, and science is more and more documenting this, is that there are real 'chinks' in the armor of evolution being the only way we came about. The idea of their being a, you know, a little mud hole and two mosquitoes get together and the next thing you know you have a human being is completely at odds with, you know, one of the laws of thermodynamics which is the law of, of... in essence, destruction. Whether you think about your bedroom and how messy it gets over time or you think about the decay in the building itself over time. Things don't naturally order themselves towards progression. Uuummm... in the natural order of things. So, it's in fact, it's against fairly basic laws of physics... and so I would not have a problem in teaching both. Uh, you saying this is one theory and this is another theory.

A little mud hole and two mosquitoes? As John Lynch says, "That is probably the most semi-literate thing I have heard from the mouth of a politician in a long, long, long time."

^(†) Snow failed to comment on the existence of a third "creative" culture, an omission that either highlights his own cultural prejudices, or indicates that the emergence of this group as a culture did not occur until more recently.