Roden Domingo De Moya

[ Wed. Jan. 28. 2009 ]

Two Victorian gentleman, back in 1875, engaged in an entertaining polemic about the superiority of science or the humanities. TH Huxley disregard the study of the classics asMatthew Arnold was mofaba of evolutionary theory, both with similar intellectual occlusion. The rifirrafe was repeated in the late fifties when CP Snow, a physicist and novelist, denounced the chasm separating the "two cultures", the scientific and literary, and ran a way of understanding something of an unequal alliance of civilizations among scientists that are moving steadily towards the future and some intellectuals that carry the weight of the past. That alliance was hot air and Snow is to step out of an angry guardian letters FR Leavis who encouraged the cotarro.

Now things are clearer and Leavis draws the wrath of nostalgic sympathy for the old junk. The narrow plume of people with scientific knowledge has been hard to crack, so that even in the nineties, John Brockman returned to the burden by advocating a "third culture", resulting from the reconciliation of science and letters. But this third culture, such as the Edge of Brockman have slipped on the thick skin of the writers alone, and has been echoed in the scientific community, increasingly concerned by spreading its activities.

All this brings me to remember the neuroscientist R. Douglas Hofstadter, who became famous in 1980 when he won with a fascinating book, Godel, Escher, Bach, the Pulitzer and the American Book Award. Hofstadter proposed that arises from our individual self-functioning of the mind. Although this sounds thick, the scientist who plays the piano and has translated the novel in verse Eugene Onegin by Pushkin, it has a stunning clarity that leads to deception of the reader feel smarter. Intellectual joy that can be tested in his latest book, I am a strange loop. Nostalgia with the return of the third culture in which a scientist pampers his writings as would a poet (Hofstadter does) and a passionate writer metabolize fabulous trompicones of science.

¿TERCERA CULTURA? [Spanish original]

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