What is this quote about being scientifically illiterate?

April 21, 2019 5:40 PM

I heard or read a quote in the last couple months (although the quote itself may very well be older than that) describing how being scientifically illiterate was totally acceptable among "educated," "intellectual" groups of people. It was an argument along the lines that saying at a dinner party that you didn't understand science -- particularly Physics, I think -- was totally acceptable in a way that saying you didn't understand literature was not. I think I remember a comparison between the Schroedinger equation or the Heisenberg Uncertainty principle and Shakespeare, although I could be misremembering the details. Does this ring a bell for anyone?
posted by Betelgeuse to Science & Nature (3 answers total)

Best answer: Is it this quote from C. P. Snow (from "Across the Great Divide". Nature Physics. 5 (5): 309. 2009.)?

A good many times 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 the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

posted by alex1965 at 5:57 PM on April 21, 2019 [24 favorites]

Response by poster: Yes! Wow! Thanks!
posted by Betelgeuse at 6:04 PM on April 21, 2019

I'd add this relevant quote too:

There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."

Isaac Asimov
posted by lowflash at 7:06 PM on April 21, 2019 [8 favorites]