I was born in the mid-1950s at a time when there was an intellectual debate raging that was articulated most clearly by the scientist, writer and administrator, CP Snow in his 1959 Rede Lecture, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution”. The lecture was about an educational rift he saw appearing between the arts and the sciences. Several years later, as a teenager at school, this rift became real as the school timetable forced me to choose between either following the arts or the sciences, because it was impossible to follow a mixture of both.

This polarizing debate runs through the whole of the English education system and still haunts us down to today where STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects are seen to take priority over the humanities. My school education broadly followed Harold Wilson’s “White Heat” of technology speech entitled “Labour and the Scientific Revolution“, which was given at the Labour Party’s Conference at Scarborough in 1963, and which gave political priority to science subjects over the arts. Needless to say, I took a series of advanced studies based on Physics, Chemistry and Biology before going on to an undergraduate degree in Applied Biology. It would be a prelude to a career in agricultural science.

Therefore, after the age of fifteen I have never formally been taught any literature, history or humanities subjects. This has left an intellectual spectre that has haunted me ever since, and I am sure I am not alone. Over the years I have come to understand that the two cultures debate results from a profound problem regarding the nature of knowledge, and the manner by which scientists split the world between subject and object. This website attempts to reconcile this polarized debate by highlighting some of the issues involved, and by explaining my scientific work in an imaginative way that helps to bring the sciences back together with the arts once again.