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.