The 10 Cultures Problem

In 1959, the novelist and physicist CP Snow delivered the annual Rede Lecture in Cambridge under the title of ‘The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution’. Snow warned of a gap that had opened up between the sciences and the humanities that made it almost impossible for the two groups to communicate.

Snow complained that those in the humanities were not only ignorant of science, but hostile towards it, as if scientific knowledge were unnecessary for a good education. Snow believed that improvements in the teaching of science were required in order to address the world’s greatest problems, and that both the USA and the USSR were ahead of Britain in that respect.

Today, a similar divide exists in computing, between the culture of the coders and that of the users. Thompson’s lecture will consider what level of understanding of computer science is needed in order to be an effective and engaged member of modern society – is there a technological equivalent of Snow’s complaint that his literary acquaintances did not know of the Second Law of Thermodynamics?

Cambridge has been at the forefront of advances in computing for nearly two centuries. In the 1820s, Charles Babbage originated the idea for the programmable computer, when he designed the 'difference engine', a machine to calculate mathematical tables. This year also marks the 60th Anniversary of the EDSAC, the world’s first stored-program computer, which was developed at Cambridge by Maurice Wilkes and his team.

Bill Thompson took the Diploma in Computer Science in 1983 and now describes himself as a ‘technology critic’, working for the BBC, Arts Council England and others.

Wednesday’s lecture begins from 2.15 pm at the University Computer Laboratory, JJ Thomson Avenue, West Cambridge and is open to all. There will also be a self-guided walk of computing-related sites around Cambridge on the morning of the talk. Please visit the Computer Laboratory website at www.cl.cam.ac.uk for further details.