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Re: I would have been a botanist



But........

C.D. started out as a "stamp collector" and then proposed a unifying theory! He published early ~ 1860?

bc


Hugh Haskell wrote:

I have a coffee mug produced by a publisher a few years back,
promoting one physics text or another. It says: "In science there is
only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting."

Certainly not true today, but it probably was much more true in 1900,
when there really was no unifying theory to cover chemistry, biology
or geology, etc. Mostly all those folks did was collect and
categorize samples. Even the chemists were about mostly just creating
as many molecules and reactions as they could and keeping the ones
that seemed to give something useful. The periodic table was still
pretty new, and no one understood why it worked, and there were a
non-negligible minority of scientists who didn't even believe in
atoms.

Hugh

I thought Rutherford's quote was "All science is either physics or
stamp collecting".

Bruce McKay


The version of Rutherford's quote that I am familiar with
is "Physics is the only science - the rest is stamp collecting."

>Vic DeCarlo
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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