Why is literature illiteracy so acceptable? There’s two levels of scientific illiteracy. One is in the general population, but the general population also has,

Why is literature illiteracy so acceptable? There’s two levels of scientific illiteracy. One is in the general population, but the general population also has, for example, literature illiteracy too. The other is the topic of C.P. Snow’s famous Two Cultures essay, where the generally well educated members of society are separated into those who know about science but not the humanities and the opposite. It certainly used to be the case that those educated members of society could discuss both topics. I’ve heard a claim that one thing is the replacement of any kind of ontology for science with mathematics (ie you don’t have a theory for why the world is but merely that some equations hold), and this mathematics isn’t easy—you need a lot more than school mathematics to understand Maxwell’s equations for example.