"The Two Cultures" is the first part of an influential 1959 Rede Lecture by British scientist and novelist C. P. Snow. The lecture was published that same year in book form as The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution. Snow's thesis was that science and the humanities, which represented "the intellectual life of the whole of western society", had become divided into "two cultures", and that the growing division between them was a major handicap in solving the world's problems.