Unit 1: Two Cultures


Galaxy pictured above.
As an astrophysics major, I spend a large amount of my time doing hefty, tiresome mathematical computations. Although I often get lost in all the math that is required, I try not to lose picture of the beauty of what I am studying. It was all of the beautiful pictures of galaxies and the cosmos that inspired me to study astrophysics in the first place.
International Space Station orbiting Earth.


I often think about how scientists need to utilize divergent thinking in order to produce significant advances in their fields of expertise. For example, a vast amount of creativity and mathematical rigor is needed to successfully create and design all the high-tech telescopes, spacecraft and satellites that are needed in order to study the solar system and outer space. I believe there is a balance that needs to be achieved between literary arts and science in order to excel in the vast majority of fields of study.   

In everyday life, people often don't group science and art in the same category; they are often completely different worlds to most people. As CP Snow highlights in The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution, despite some people having nearly everything in common except their chosen area of study, they speak completely different languages (Snow 2). This is something that I experience daily as a UCLA student.
  At UCLA, the divide between literary arts majors and STEM majors is prevalent. North campus is known as the arts/humanities side of campus, while south campus is known as the STEM side of campus.  Not only are students often condescending or passive-aggressive towards each other in these ongoing north campus vs. south campus battles, but even UCLA's campus serves to bridge a divide between the disciplines, as seen in the map.
Map of UCLA indicating where North and South campus
are located on the campus. From
According to Victoria Vesna, the emergence of something new can be due to endless mutations of various disciplines (Vesna 123). Reading these texts made me realize that literary arts and science should not be as separated as it currently is, since without the literary arts, much of science would not be as developed as it is right now.

Sources

  • Bohm, D. “On Creativity.” Leonardo, vol. 1, no. 2, 1968, pp. 137–149. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1571951.
  • Klebnikov, Sergei. “Liberal Arts vs. STEM: The Right Degrees, The Wrong Debate.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 19 June 2015, 
  • The RSA, director. RSA ANIMATE: Changing Education Paradigms. YouTube, 14 Oct. 2010, youtu.be/zDZFcDGpL4U.
  • Snow, Charles Percy “Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Reading. 1959. New York: Cambridge UP, 1961. Print.
  • Vesna, Victoria. “Toward a Third Culture: Being in Between.” Leonardo, vol. 34, no. 2, 2001, pp. 121–125     








Comments

  1. Charles TongApril 5, 2019 at 2:52 PM

    I wholeheartedly agree with you. As a mathematics of computation major, while I may not be taking as many humanities courses, some imagination and visualization is necessary to succeed in some math courses, such as understanding topology and 3-D imaging. Also, advanced math becomes less of performing computations and more of logical thinking and proofs, something that philosophy majors are trained to consider. And just as how it is impossible to compare apples to oranges or monkeys to fish, science and art are two different fields that require different sorts of thinking. While the majors are divided as they are because of UCLA's design, I believe that they do go together.

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