In the 1960s, the British novelist and physicist Charles Percy Snow noticed that although the humanities students at his university in Cambridge raved about Shakespeare's sonnets, they did not know the second law of thermodynamics. That was not part of education.
Snow used this arrogance to diagnose a separation of literary and scientific culture. Since then, people have wondered whether this division is just last year's snow or has retained its relevance. It is argued that it is neither about the sonnets nor the theorem, but rather about understanding the world, which is what both literature and physics strive for. Anyone who takes this into account will find that the poet stops time in his work in order to capture his beloved in her beauty forever in the sonnet, while science must state that time in reality can only be in motion and is heading towards death. Anyone who wants to understand time as a whole would be well advised to take a look at both poetry and physics. Sometimes a literary text is difficult to understand, and sometimes one despairs of the world view of science. When this view of things developed, Franz Kafka's novels were also written, which are mentioned here because the literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin thought around 1930 that the Kafkaesque world could be better understood if the aporias of modern physics were placed alongside it. Apparently Benjamin thought that the propositions of natural science were comprehensible enough to make the incomprehensible nature of Prague prose understandable. It seems to me that the opposite is rather the case, which means that the wondrous insights of atomic physics can be brought closer to people if they are integrated into a narrative and experience crazy worlds of the kind described by Kafka. When physicists explored the microscopic spheres at the beginning of the 20th century, they wondered whether they would ever be able to understand the madness they found there. Yes! But only if we also understand what understanding means. But not only with the head, also with the heart. If we succeed in warming our hearts and minds to atoms and molecules, if poetry and physics come together, then the culture that Snow dreamed of will emerge. It is what makes us human.
