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Re: Hubris of physicists



Statements such as that made in the Physics Today sidebar do not
serve us well.

Gould suffers from Alvarez envy. Gould's highly self promoted
"punctuated equilibrium" is not revolutionary; it follows
naturally from Luis Alvarez's brilliant insight. It seems to me
that Alvarez's achievement, made by a Nobel laureate physicist
after his retirement and outside the narrowly defined field of
physics, is adequate testimony that physicists have something of
value to offer outside that narrow field. Posturing in print
is evidently unnecessary.

Luis Alvarez was one of my teachers. He was excellent at that
activity too, but I didn't get along well with him because he
was personally somewhat unapproachable. I did interact with him
in later years, but the old friction was still there to some
extent. His science, however, is admirable! I recommend that in
your next reading list you include his autobiography. For the
physicist the collection of his papers "Alvarez Revealed" is
well worth looking at after you have read the autobiography. I
know of no other physicist who has made contributions of
comparable variety; physics teachers should read these books.

Stephen Jay Gould is an excellent speaker and I like his books,
too. He is in my opinion a better popularizer of science than
Sagan or Hawking, but not as good as Hans Christian von Baeyer,
a physicist who is less well known. None of Gould's books is as
thrilling as Feynman's "QED the strange theory of light and
matter", but the latter book is less accessible. Few look upon
the Feynman Lectures as popular books, but there is a lot
between the equations that bears reading by nonspecialists. It
is too bad that those parts are rendered inaccessible to the
general public by their context. Someone should edit the red
books down to a more generally palatable form.

Leigh