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From: "T.K. Wang & Mary Brooks" <tkmary@dslextreme.com>
Date: 2011, January 19, 19:44:23 PST
To: "Bernard Cleyet" <bernardcleyet@redshift.com>
Subject: Fw: Fw: [Phys-l] The humble physicist
----- Original Message ----- From: <RN@rettacs.org>
To: "T.K. Wang & Mary Brooks" <tkmary@dslextreme.com>
Sent: Wednesday, January 19, 2011 1:54 PM
Subject: Re: Fw: [Phys-l] The humble physicist
Quoting "T.K. Wang & Mary Brooks" <tkmary@dslextreme.com>:
I think I see where the notion of the arrogant physicist comes from.
First of all, some high-profile physicists are undeniably arrogant.
Physicists take pride in their work and think it is important. Perhaps
most significantly, physicists tend to think that their scientific
worldview, with its ideals of objectivity and empiricism, is superior
to the alternatives.
But aren’t those all human qualities, not doled out in special measure
to physicists?
I am a chemist by education but my work was always at some boundary
between physics and chemistry. There is a very high probability that
a physicist one meets is a flaming dillweed. Largely true of chemists
like me, as well. As in any field, there is a pecking order.
Theorists think they're better than experimentalists, high-energy
physicists think that anything else is just mindless engineering of
their 'deep, fundamental truths.' Physical chemists like me were
given to believe that organic chemistry was mindless engineering, etc.
Mathematicians feel superior to physicists who feel superior to
chemists who feel superior to biologists.
When you put a bunch of physicists in a room, the exchanges are likely to be blunt and delivered at high volume. That form of commerce has often been called arrogant, but it is not arrogant per se, nor does it imply an underlying arrogance of the speaker. Rather, in my experience, the physicists’ discourse is a reflection of a passionate desire to know and the intense frustration of just not getting it.
First, anyone using the 'p' word should be taken out and shot.
There's also the higher probability that the volume is due to the high
concentration of flaming dillweeds.
By academic standards, physicists are unusually social animals.
The American Physical Society holds a big meeting every year in March.
The APS March Meeting is known as Geek Week. The APS March Meeting
has also been disinvited from being in Las Vegas because the attendees
don't gamble or partake of the <ahem> hospitality <cough> sufficiently
to offset the discounts. I asked a former president of the society if
this were true or an urban legend. He claimed it was true. So,
unless he is bustin' my chops...
Physicists: social, fair if not generous toward colleagues, open to the possibility that their ideas may be wrong, and remarkably willing to accept criticism. Sounds to me like the opposite of arrogant.
See page 189 of
http://books.google.com/books?id=xnckeeTICn0C&lpg=PA189&ots=O2QQWQfRlh&dq=sam%20ting%20%22who%20will%20remember%22&pg=PA189#v=onepage&q&f=false
...In 1983, commenting on the Rubbia experiment reviewed above and
doubtless on his own experience ten years before, Samuel Ting said,
"In physics there's no number two. Who will remember what UA2 has
done? ...