Our intellectual age is antidisciplinarian. At approximately the moment that C. P. Snow decided to inform the world, in a lecture that is mysteriously still famous, that intellectual life was divided by scientists and humanists into warring camps, some of the liminal thinkers and writers of our time were shaping our current sense of the full permeability and sympathetic interrelationship of disciplines. Unknown to Snow, but nearly as he spoke, Thomas Kuhn and Paul K. Feyerabend were independently formulating the idea that successive scientific theories manufacture conflicting conceptual universes out of skewed concepts; since successive theories can never be properly measured against each other, scientific revolutions are at least partly irrational. The idea led to much excitement among humanists, and Feyerabend, if not Kuhn, has supported their inference that science can no longer assert its rational superiority to softer disciplines. Meanwhile, in France, Foucault was inventing the episteme, within which disciplines from the arts to the sciences may form a nexus, across which science does not necessarily evolve but rather may be thoroughly revolutionized. Once again, any notion that science differs from other fields by virtue of its unflagging rational progress seemed to have been invalidated. In America, Thomas Pynchon was beginning a career whose moral, for some critics, was that literature had discovered how much its survival depended on surrendering its high-tonedness and high-handedness with respect to illiterate science. Pynchon is still thought to have proved that modern literature must make poetry out of equations and chemical bonds.