[Phys-L] Re: what is "physics"

["Thomas O'Neill" <oneill@SVGS.K12.VA.US>]

John,
        As a former chemist masquerading as a Physics teacher, I concur
with your colleagues.  A single atom is physics, more than one is
chemistry. <!>

        Seriously, I never understood the division of science that could
lead to the establishment of the Journal of Chemical Physics and the
Journal of Physical Chemistry at the same time.


THO

Thomas O'Neill
Physics
Shenandoah Valley Governor's School

-----Original Message-----
From: John Denker [mailto:jsd@AV8N.COM]
Sent: Friday, September 30, 2005 1:26 PM
To: PHYS-L@LISTS.NAU.EDU
Subject: Re: what is "physics"

SSHS KPHOX wrote:
> .... when we do thnk of a project it is Engineering we lean to
> rather than simply Physics. Do we set these up to emphasize Physics?
>
> Just pondering ....

My opinion:

1) Small answer: Usually, any given project can be tweaked so as
to emphasize physics.

FWIW when I go bike-riding with my 10-year-old nephew, it turns
into a physics lesson.  PE converts to KE and back when we
come to a dip.  Going up a mountain in low gear exemplifies
mechanical advantage, explainable in terms of conservation of
energy (small force with many strokes, versus larger force with
fewer strokes).

2) Big answer:  I tend to take an expansive view of what "physics"
is.  Not everyone does;  I have met physicists who thought that
anything with more than one atom in it wasn't physics;  in particular
solid-state physics wasn't physics.  I thought these guys were nuts.

In contrast, there are guys like Carver Mead.  He was professor
of electrical engineering, and IEEE named him "Engineer of the
Century" or something like that.   But he was trained as a physicist.
I always thought of him as a physicist (which didn't make him
any less of an engineer).  Perhaps more to the point, Feynman
thought Carver was a physicist.

On the other edge of the same sword, Feynman wasn't above taking
a job as "Chief Engineer of the Metalloplast Corporation" or
offering a prize (1000 dollars, back when that was a lot of
money) to the first person who could make an electric motor
smaller than 1/64th of an inch on a side, and another prize
for the first microlithography.  He also had a longstanding
interest in computation, especially parallel computation and
biocomputation.

Read the lists of Nobel Laureates in chemistry, medicine, and
even economics, and see how many were trained as physicists.

Think about how much of what we call mathematics was invented by
physicists.

I'm not saying every physicist has to be an expert in every
possible application and tangent ... I'm just saying that if
you see an opportunity to make a connection, make it!

By way of contrast, in some places the chemistry department
takes a narrow view of chemistry.  The P-Chem (physical
chemistry) instructors take such a narrow view of entropy
that they contradict the notion of entropy that is used in
the electrical engineering department (error correction),
the math and computer science department (cryptology),
the physics department, and even the English department
(librarianship).  It's a scandal.  Also because of those
narrow views, biochemistry became part of the biology
department, and the chemistry guys wonder why they are
on the outside looking in.

Bottom line:  Taking a narrow view of one's field is a recipe
for sclerosis and death.  Some fields deserve to die this way,
but physics does not.
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