Skip to main content

One Culture

The distinction between ‚two cultures' is artificial and deleterious, as is argued in ‚Wissenschaft ist keine Kunst' („Science is not Art") by Rapoport and Hucho .
Clearly, Humanities are concerned with understanding while the Sciences look for explanations – but the different focus can neither be reason nor excuse for a separation in disjunct categories of culture.
The real difference obviously is the different public appeal, the difference in popularity. While humanities can be chatted about even without deep understanding – just as a piece of music can be enjoyed without any understanding of an underlying theory – this is impossible with science. There can be Pop-music, pop-Humanities but no Pop-Science.


Rapoport and Hucho describe two levels of access to both cultures: the emotional approach (which they call vegetative) and the learned, theoretical approach. While the hard sciences lack the first, popular culture is based on it. The consequence must not be to popularize the hard sciences to science-pop but to insist on the deeper levels of understanding also of art and humanities.
Otherwise what is meant with 'culture' tastes too much like 'pop'

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Academics should be blogging? No.

"blogging is quite simply, one of the most important things that an academic should be doing right now" The London School of Economics and Political Science states in one of their, yes, Blogs . It is wrong. The arguments just seem so right: "faster communication of scientific results", "rapid interaction with colleagues" "responsibility to give back results to the public". All nice, all cuddly and warm, all good. But wrong. It might be true for scientoid babble. But this is not how science works.  Scientists usually follow scientific methods to obtain results. They devise, for example, experiments to measure a quantity while keeping the boundary-conditions in a defined range. They do discuss their aims, problems, techniques, preliminary results with colleagues - they talk about deviations and errors, successes and failures. But they don't do that wikipedia-style by asking anybody for an opinion . Scientific discussion needs a set

How Does Knowledge Get Into Society? A fly-by-artist-in-residence and a Dialogue

The artist Sadie Weis was shadowing some of the scientists at Paul-Drude-Institut (a research-institute for nanomaterials) for eight weeks, observing the way they work, how scientists communicate with eachother, how they explain stuff to an outsider. The result of this dialogue is a light-installation and - maybe more important for the scientists involved - a reflection of the scientists  and of the artist on the languages they use.  T his project of an artist in a fly-by-residency will be wrapped up on Saturday, November 10th with a p resentation by the artist Sadie Weis and a panel discussion on differences and similarities in the way artists and scientists communicate with the outside world                  November 10, 2018 from 14-18                 Paul-Drude-Institut für Festkörperelektronik                  Hausvogteiplatz 5–7, Berlin-Mitte                Germany For  the Dialogue,  please register at   exhibition@pdi-berlin.de .   Der Dialog wird auf Deutsc

Driven by rotten Dinosaurs

My son is 15 years old. He asked me what a FAX-machine was. He get's the strange concept of CDs because there is a rack full with them next to the bookshelf, which contains tons of paper bound together in colorful bundles, called 'books'. He still accepts that some screens don't react to you punching your fingers on them. He repeatedly asks why my 'car' (he speaks the quotation marks) is powered by 'rotten dinosaurs'. At the same time he writes an email to Elon Musks Neuralink asking for an apprenticeship and sets up discord-servers for don't-ask-me-what. And slowly I am learning that it is a very good thing to be detached from historic technology, as you don't try to preserve an outdated concept while aiming to innovate. The optimized light-bulb would be an a wee bit more efficient, tiny light-bulb. But not a LED. An optimized FAX would probably handle paper differently - it would not be a file-transfer-system. Hyper-modern CDs might have tenf