In the midst of the Cold War, more precisely on 7 May 1959, the English scientist and writer C.P. Snow held a legendary lecture at Cambridge University. The lecture was about modern society's "two cultures", the humanities and the natural sciences, which he contended were in critical opposition to each other. Scientists, artists, and intellectuals lacked the ability to talk across differences and thus had no deep comprehension of each other's thinking. His hope was that the two cultures could respect each other's values so that they could communicate effectively in speech. Such mutual understanding was needed, he argued, to solve the world's problems.