Literary intellectuals and physical scientists form two groups separated by a gulf of mutual incomprehension, sometimes hostility, but mostly a lack of understanding, so that each has a distorted image of the other. They have stopped sharing a common language and cannot communicate across the subject matter they each take for granted.
Asking a roomful of highly educated literary people to state the Second Law of Thermodynamics meets a cold negative response, yet this is the scientific equivalent of asking whether they have read a work of Shakespeare. Scientific ignorance is treated as socially acceptable in a way comparable literary ignorance never would be, exposing an asymmetry in what counts as being educated.
Scientists tend to feel, often without articulating it, that the social condition can be improved and that they hold the future in their bones, whereas many literary intellectuals are natural Luddites who met the Industrial Revolution with incomprehension or hostility. Viewing the two cultures through their differing stance toward the future reveals a deep divergence in temperament, not just in knowledge.
The separation of the cultures is not an inevitable product of specialization but is worsened by an educational system, particularly the English one, that forces early over-specialization and narrows minds prematurely. Because it is made by teaching, it can in principle be unmade by teaching, and other systems that specialize less demonstrate the alternative.