When C. P. Snow delivered his famous Rede Lecture at Cambridge in 1959, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” few of us who were present in the Senate House foresaw the acclaim his paper was going to receive. I remember measuring its reception from the assembled company of good gray dons and a few visitors as cool, if not hostile, but the commonplaces that Lord Snow uttered that day were uttered with a pungency and timeliness and force that made them seem fresh, and we have come to look upon them as one of the most penetrating diagnoses of our age that has yet been made.