On Valentine’s Day, 1912, Arizona was warmly embraced by the union and became our forty-eighth state. In January, 1959, close to fifty years later, Alaska joined in; it became state number forty-nine, and it also received an embrace but one that was not nearly so warm. It was, in fact, quite chilly. In August, 1959, Hawaii got us back on track with some of the world’s best weather, joining the rest of us to became the fiftieth state of the union. Despite their unique noncontiguous status, the two white stars which Alaska and Hawaii added to the flag will not disrupt the flag’s contiguity. Both new stars will remain in touch on the flag, if not on the map, their contiguity colored white on blue.

In 1954 the Geneva Accords had split the Vietnam homeland into North and South, along the 17th parallel. Ho Chi Minh would rule the North, Bao Dai, the South. The Accords also gave Cambodia and Loas their independent status. In 1959, however, the North Vietnamese built a trail through Laos and Cambodia to South Vietnam, to supply weapons, ammunition, and manpower to their friends and allies in the South. They called it the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It gave the North the upper hand.

In January, 1959, Luna1 (Soviet) was the first spacecraft to break through Earth’s gravity. A group-based guidance system malfunctioned when it ran out of battery power, shortening its burn time and falling short of a lunar landing and staying in heliocentric orbit, lost to the science the Soviets had planned.

Pushed by the success in 1957 of Yuri Gagarin in Sputnik I, NASA, in 1959, announced the seven original American astronauts to fly for Project Mercury. John Glenn was the first American to orbit the earth in 1962, circling three times before his slash-down landing. He subsequently served in the U.S.Senate for twenty-four years, a democrat representing Ohio.

Boeing’s 707 made its appearance in 1959 and became a favorite with carriers and with the flying public. The vast majority of the traveling public stayed on the ground, however, taking advantage of Eisenhower’s interstate highway system. Total number of miles: 46,876. Interstate 90 is the longest of all: 3,020 miles from Logan International in Boston, to Seattle, Washington.

1959 was also the year C.P. Snow gave the Rede lecture at Cambridge, England, titled, “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” At the start of Snow’s lecture is a virtual, and to my way of thinking, an inappropriate apology. What qualified him, he claims, to give the Rede lecture “was a piece of luck…that arose through coming from a poor family.” But he had earned his PhD in physics at Cambridge by age 25. He wanted to write. His family was unable to support him as a writer, so he looked for work where he was most likely to receive a living wage as a writer. His “piece of luck” included meeting W.L.Bragg by chance, a Fellow of the Royal Society and already a recipient of the Nobel Prize, for his contributions to xray crystallography including the law of diffraction. Bragg worked among some of the top physicists in the world, like Dirac, Rutherford, Eddington. Not Snow, but others, point out Snow’s scientific pedigree. It is impressive, yet he seems diffident when he speaks for the scientific culture. He seems more comfortable challenging those he is more apt to be with at Chalsea after the theater, sharing a beer. What is important about this book is its revelation of the depths of the chasm he ran into by chance, and now feels obliged to make public. He sees himself as a writer of fiction, but this account is the best any truth-telling journalist could hope to do. I will quote until I sense his words embody the truths of his experience as a part of two cultures, scientists and intellectuals, the latter being the culture of nonscientists. What Snow realized frustrated him is his daily finding that the two groups had almost ceased to communicate at all…”They have a curious distorted image of each other.” “Non-scientists tend to think of scientists as brash and boastful” His writing is a revelation more than an argument. He sees scientists as more apt to have a religious affiliation or interest and more apt to come from the country. His conclusion demonstrates no ‘taking sides.” It is simply that “This polarization is sheer loss to us all, practical, intellectual and creative loss.” His admittedly amateur social-political-educational evaluation is that “both sides are self-impoverished.” His literary friends chuckle when they hear of scientists who have never read a major work of English literature. He then contemplates asking a writer if he can describe the second law of thermodynamics. That question evokes a cold, negative response. Snow simply suggests the second law…is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare’s?

Snow opines: “There seems to be no place where cultures meet.”