Is medicine more "scientific" than physics?

People want to believe that medicine is very scientific, and so they do - despite medicine being astoundingly unscientific in most of its aspects.

Once again, we find that the data can be explained by referring to a simple fact: people are dumb.

And why was chemistry left completely out of the mix? I'd guess that chemistry would be rated as more scientific than either biology or physics by people with less education.

May be this paper that discusses medical research is relevant here. Though I am not sure if this is true in the case of physics researches too.

Medicine is not very scientific per se. However, a few of the tools and medicines used in the medical field are sophisiticated and produced by engineers physicists, chemists, etc.
So the public perceives this knowledge as medical.
Most MDs have only a relatively superficial knowldge of how their tools work or how they are made, they just know how to use them.

1. Vague answers to vague questions.

2a. Go to a hospital. There are lots of machines that go "bing".

2b. Read of physics in the popular press. It's some speculation about time travel or the origin of the universe or particles with goofy names.

I think the problem is with the methodology of the study itself. It's much easier to ask people about their ideas about pure fields like engineering, biology, physics etc but medicine is a combination of physics/biology/physiology etc, it's multidisciplinary.

Also the question of how 'scientific' any of those top 4 fields are is absurd, they're all equally 'scientific' in their approach to their subject matter.

The bottom four arn't sciences at all so I have no idea why you'd put them in the study except to get a baseline figure for the number of morons responding.

what people mean by 'scientific' in this context?:)
And what i'd mean if answered!? I'd have to invent meanings.

BTW, what do engineers/historians answer when asked?

Agree with you.

Physics and engineering should be more scientific than Medicine because these fields rely more on pure logics and math.

Medicine still has a lot of speculation and guess work which is very much like fortune teller. Alternative medicine is even worse, which is purely magic based, or just voodoo.

But with molecular biology, medicine does have hope to evolve into true science.

Considering that the physics community has been unable to resolve the fundamental contradictions between quantum mechanics and general relativity for 90 years, that they embrace such absurdities as the anthropic principle and mutiverses, that they waste the entire careers of hundreds (if not thousands) of the best minds in academia over nonsense like string theory and tokamak fusion (actually scientific and criminal fraud in this case), it is difficult to see why physics should be regarded as a science at all. Put physics at the bottom of the heap, below history, and the poll makes perfectly good sense.

Medicine doesn't seem to be so much "scientific" as "technical". One is not supposed to "experiment" on one's patients.
From the graphs, it doesn't appear that any distinction between "scientific" and "technical" is being made, and I think a majority of people confound the two terms. It doesn't help that "medicine" is a pretty vague term as well, which can mean anything from EMT's to experimental biochemists depending on who is being asked.
Put another way, "medicine" should really be considered a form of "applied biology", much as "engineering" is "applied physics"...

Put another way, "medicine" should really be considered a form of "applied biology", much as "engineering" is "applied physics"...

i think this is a good way to put it.

I actually question the premise of the study. History is less scientific than physics because history studies topics which don't have science-like answers. Even very successful applications of science or history (e.g Cavalli-Sforza) only add specific scientific data points to a still "non-scientific" historical discourse. They don't replace non-science with science except on one particular question.

By and large, someone for whom it's important to be scientific shouldn't go into history because history can be only a little scientific. If you want to you can brag about how much more scientific you are than a historian, but it's really stupid to do so. The implication is that if you went into history you'd be scientific there, too, but you wouldn't. You might add some particular scientific input to the historical mix, as C-S did, but the argument would remain a non-scientific, historical argument.

For example, I've been reading climatic theories of history as long as I've been reading history. Some of them add valuable information, and some are mostly conjectural, but none of them transform history into a science.

The first four choices should be in reverse order...then they would make sense. And i say this as a practicing doctor. Of the choices below that, accounting seems to have the most serious content. The rest are so heavily contaminated with witchcraft and fairytales, its hard to say...

Bob S writes:
Considering that the physics community has been unable to resolve the fundamental contradictions between quantum mechanics and general relativity for 90 years, that they embrace such absurdities as the anthropic principle and mutiverses, that they waste the entire careers of hundreds (if not thousands) of the best minds in academia over nonsense like string theory and tokamak fusion (actually scientific and criminal fraud in this case), it is difficult to see why physics should be regarded as a science at all. Put physics at the bottom of the heap, below history, and the poll makes perfectly good sense.

One sees a bit of inter-field rivalry between, for example, biology and physics, and a little rivalry is a good thing, I think. However, those with physics backgrounds, especially those with a creationist-bent, often go overboard in their biology bashing/physics boosting.

A prime example - when pro-IDcreationist (theoretical) physicist Barrow said of Richard Dawkins, words to the effect of 'You are a biologist, not a scientist,' and, of course, the old 'everything but physics is just stamp collecting.'

So, I got to thinking...

Look at the things Bob S refers to - quantum mechanics, relativity, string theory, etc. Hell - I'd add magnetism and lightening to the mix. What do they all have in common? They are descriptions of things. Models/descriptions of how the universe works. Stamp collecting.

The only difference between the 'stamp collecting' physicists do and what biologists do is that what the physicists do uses more math and often less data.

Personally, I think the one of the main reasons educated professionals think physics is more scientific than biology is because even educated professionals are, at some level, mathphobes, and thus a math-laden field like physics, thus MUST be 'hard' and complex and super scientific.

But that is just my opinion....

Bob S is a retard. don't feed the troll (i'll delete subsequent tarded comments). in any case, this is dumb:

Personally, I think the one of the main reasons educated professionals think physics is more scientific than biology is because even educated professionals are, at some level, mathphobes, and thus a math-laden field like physics, thus MUST be 'hard' and complex and super scientific.

anyone with a science degree has taken physics. the power of newtonian mechanics to model the universe is mind-blowing, let's not kid ourselves. anyone who claims that physics is stamp-collecting like biology is stamp-collecting is asking to be taken unseriously.

Ok, being a physicist let me explain why physicists say things like "there's physics and stamp collecting" and what is usually meant by that with two simple generic examples from biology, since I obviously don't know much about it.

Finding that there is a general basis among all life-forms, like DNA, or amino-acids and proteins, and trying to understand how this common basis is used in a variety of life-forms to produce wildly different effects is good, interesting science.

Stamp-collecting would be picking up a cell, and simply trying to list all the possible molecules that make up the cell. Then picking up another 100 different cells and listing all of their molecules, and trying to make some huge data-base of molecules.

Now, there is definetly a need for the second type of cataloguing activity - you need alot of data to figure stuff out. However, once you have your data you have to try to get something out of it - some model of how these molecules work together, how could certain modifications change things. Otherwise, it is just stamp-collecting. And there is a pretty definitive difference here between these activities.

To give a grander example one can describe the whole fossil record and all the species in the world. But to do science would be to think of evolution and understand how all these species came about and why these and not something else.

Being outside of the field of biology I can't really gauge which type of activity is more prominent but it certainly seems like there is alot of interesting stuff coming out lately that's definetly not in the stamp collecting camp :).

i think john's implicit point is important to emphasize: the nature of the topic which physics studies makes it necessarily easy to do science with. the sloppier sciences aren't just sloppy because they attract, on average, less intelligent researchers (though that's true as well, physics sucks up a disproportionate amount of the A-list talent), they're just messy and the models which are produced have a crap-load of noise built into the systems. stuff which isn't very noisy, like descriptions of deterministic molecular genetic pathways, are often just not very general, or are descriptive and not predictive.

that's just life. i am very interested in biology, but the reality is that physics is more scientific, it's the gold-standard, the most popular kid. biology is sexy today because of the applications and greater numerosity of low hanging fruit, as well as the public's interest in the topics of biology, but that doesn't change the fact that physics is still more scientific.

Biology does not have many more low-hanging fruit. It is inherently much more difficult than physics, which is primarily interested in the simplest constituents of the universe. Compare the dynamics of a single cell to almost anything that interests physicists...

But since biology is so inherently challenging, it gets fewer of the A-list talents - smart people who aren't masochists avoid problems that can't be solved. What we do get in biology is a disproportionate amounts of math-phobes and stamp-collectors -- the great bulk of molecular biology is akin to counting legs on a beetle. Way too many biologists believe that once we have the beetle legs of the world catalogued, somehow magically understanding will condense from the database. I've even been seriously told that software will develop our theories for us!

That is of course not to say that there aren't many brilliant biologists - but bulk descriptions are bulk descriptions. I've seen less math-fear in PR than in biology. Math is the sina-qua-non of science.

Math is the sina-qua-non of science.

i think many would say that it is a powerful tool, as opposed to a fixed end toward which all science must target....

Well, razib, you'd be wrong.

It's not that the end is fixed - it's that anything that isn't formulated mathematically is too vague to be deeply testable, is too loose to be powerfully predictive and too entrained in in local language to be universally understood. Without putting your statements into formula, you don't even know whether they are consistent with themselves (much less the larger world).

You don't have to start with quantified and formulated theories, but if you don't end up there, you're just spinning your wheels. In some fields it may be centuries before things can be formulated in such a compressed form. It took physics several millenia to get to it's current state - hopefully biology isn't too many centuries behind.

frog, all of those things can be done with normal language. It just takes a lot of work.

Math can be a deceptive dead-end, too - see string theory.

Yeah... I gotta say physics definitely seems to be more "scientific" than any other field of science. I know that philosophers of science have long held this bias, as they have tried to mold all other sciences to be like physics. This is because, just like frog said, physics gives us math, and math gives us beautiful predictions which can match the data spectacularly.

Have you ever derived a differential equation, solved it, and then actually tested the data that you were interested in? The feeling that you get when you see how perfectly the data meets with the prediction is something wholly unique in life's experiences, and is something that really only happens in physics.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a biologist through and through, but I, like many more quantitatively minded people, have had a hard on for physics ever since I realized that I can figure out exactly where a ball will land when launched off a ramp. That kind of precision is mind boggling, and anyone who doesn't think that that is what science is (at least in part) about is foolish. At least in my opinion :D

have had a hard on for physics

dude, too much information....

Put another way, "medicine" should really be considered a form of "applied biology", much as "engineering" is "applied physics"...

I'm studying medical science at the moment and our course is very close to straight up medicine and I can tell you that anyone studying medicine (at least here at FU) has to do biology and chemistry quite in-depth as well as have a good understanding of physics (i.e. blood flow calculation etc).

Sure they don't learn it to the degree of someone specialized in the field but there's is definitely a well-rounded, scientific field of expertise.

That being said, it's a wonder they put medicine in there at all considering the various fields of medicine rely more heavily on each of the above.

Also there is nothing wrong with hard-ons for physics, cmon!

I can tell you that anyone studying medicine (at least here at FU) has to do biology and chemistry quite in-depth as well as have a good understanding of physics (i.e. blood flow calculation etc).

That's nice. How much training do they get in scientific reasoning?

Scientific reasoning is part of the skills for medical scientists portion of my course (2 topics each year over three years) and I believe they have a similar set of topics over BMBS course.

I'm not saying this is the rule for all universities here in Australia just that my experience here at FU has been very positive in regard to getting a well-rounded scientific education.

For the record I'm defending the position that medicine is very scientific, not that it is more scientific than physics. I truly believe physics, biology and chemistry to be the pillars of science. I'm just lucky I'm studying in a field that let's me do all three :)

Going back to what I said, when a physicist goes into biology and discovers something new using the methods of physics, he wins this argument. But if he watches the biologists from afar and says "my work is more scientific than yours", he's just being stupid. It's like a long jumper bragging that he can jump farther than a high jumper.

Too loose to be powerfully predictive: predictivity has had to be abandoned as a standard for science, because some systems aren't predictable even after they've been mathematically described.

John couldn't the same argument be used for a biologist who observes physics and then applied something they learn there into biology? Or a biological principle such as cell equilibrium to a problem in Physics? I mean surely there's enough interrelation between the pure sciences to render the question of how 'scientific' they are kind of pointless.

Josh - I apologize for the hasty reply, it's just going midnight here and I misread your analogy, please disregard my previous post.

Predictivity has to be abandoned? That's pretty crazy. The complexity of a system does not imply that it is "impossible" to even try and predict something, just that it's rather hard, and that your predictions are less exact usually. And that almost certainly the model has to not be based on the most fundamental levels of theory. I.e. when doing molecular dynamics on atoms you don't worry about quantum chromodynamics. Hell if you're trying to figure out what large systems do you have to go to classical empirical models and abandon even quantum mechanics. Even though you may be ignoring alot of (seemingly important) interactions in a system you can often arrive at a answer that is close enough, at least on some parameters you're interested in.

To put it another way, I would guess that evolution is a theory that could be used to predict what species may survive or fail or how they would evolve based on changes in the environment (although I'm sure practically it's pretty hard to be right in your predictions). Along with explaining all the existing data. That is why it is a scientific theory. And note that to make that original theory it wasn't neccesary to even know about DNA or genes (although they are certainly hugely important).

Goddidit also in some perverse way "explains" all the previous data but it certainly says nothing at all about the future.

The complexity of a system does not imply that it is "impossible" to even try and predict something, just that it's rather hard, and that your predictions are less exact usually.

When people talk about predictivity they normally mean exact and certain prediction, and there are areas in physics where you get that. In other areas of physics you don't and in biology and history you get still less.

If less-exact and less-certain prediction is accepted as predictive, history is often predictive.

There is a huge spectrum from predictive in a classical mechanics, ball going down a ramp way, to let's say molecular dynamics the density functional theory way (which happens to be what I do), to history. In the first case you'll be exactly right, practically every time. For DFT results, depending on the system you're looking at and what you're interested in you could be almost exactly right anywhere from 98%+ of the time to it being a rough order of magnitude figure. Applying the method to all sorts of experimental results, various changes and refinements are needed to constantly make it better, or course going to a completely different method for doing the same thing like configuration interaction methods. None of these however, are "exact", nor is any other practical model dealing with any real system with interacting electrons (which is basically almost every actual physical system).

In history.. I don't know of many people who seriously run around claiming they know what will happen in any but the most general terms about anything. There are no set procedures that people reiterate and get better answers from. At best there are some people making all sorts of "best guesses", and at the end of the day, some of them turn out to be right.

There is a significant difference here, and if most of biology cannot fit in the first category, in a practical sense dealing with actual research problems physics rarely (if ever) can either.

I didn't read every single comment, so perhaps I am not the first person to point this out, but I have personally talked with a few religious fundamentalists who have a down-graded view of physics (even so far as to suggest that a large amount of physics is conspiracy against religion). So fundamentalists might poll physics are less scientific, even though within the scientific community it is traditionally considered a "hard" science.

I think that you're leaving out big chunks of physics. Furthermore, you've adapted the definition of predictivity. This isn't what physicists would have said 30 years ago:

Almost exactly right anywhere from 98%+ of the time to it being a rough order of magnitude figure. Applying the method to all sorts of experimental results, various changes and refinements are needed to constantly make it better, or course going to a completely different method for doing the same thing like configuration interaction methods.

In other words, you need to tweak on a case by case basis, the way social scientists and historians do. You've really come a lot closer to social science standards, and you've lost a lot of the bragging rights physics used to have.

My point really is that every topic studied has its own degree of knowability and predictability, and that's why history is less predictive than physics, in the same way (thouhg more so) that some areas of physics are less poredictive than other areas.

When I hear scientists talking about how bad the social sciences and history are, I always ask myself how much thye know about history. You're not going to get a very demanding history class in undergrad, except in upper division courses designed to send people to top grad schools.

In other words, you need to tweak on a case by case basis, the way social scientists and historians do. You've really come a lot closer to social science standards, and you've lost a lot of the bragging rights physics used to have.

I dunno if this is necessarily true. What we have seen recently in physics that you may be referring to are:

1)chaotic models
and
2)indeterministic models

I feel that your point is probably more relevant to chaotic models, which are by definition sensitive to initial conditions. The thing with chaotic models is that they WILL precisely predict behavior of a system, but you have to be very, very sure of the initial conditions---it's easy to show that even simple chaotic models will be sensitive to deviations in initial condition of .01.

Indeterministic models require a different sense of what it means for a prediction to be accurate, I feel. Obviously, it's a fundamental truth of quantum mechanics that we don't know where a particle is at any given time. But what we know is the probability that it will be at certain places. So we just have to check to see if our expected distributions match the experimental distributions, and that's what we do see.

So, I don't think physicists have lost much, if any, of their bragging rights. They are still far, far, far better at making predictions about the world than economists or social scientists, who are almost always lost in the land of post-hoc equivocation. Biologists, especially evolutionary and ecological theorists often find themselves in the same situations as social scientists, but in my experience, there's been some damned fine empirical justification of many of the theorems of, for example, population genetics---much more than almost any economic theory has!

...I must seem like a douche bag who hates social sciences, but I'm really not. I guess I just come from an old school philosophy of science kind of background, and I have a prescription definition of what is sciency and what isn't sciency, rather than a descriptive one, which is all the rage nowadays.

I think that you're just wrong about chaos. They just don't precisely predict at all, because you don't just need very good initial data, you need infinitely good initial data. You do know a lot about the pattern of what to expect (chaos is a usable form of knowledge), but not enough to precisely predict.

My main point is that the scientific bragging rights argument is that it's a waste of time at best and harmfully stupid at worst.

People who think history is stupid should do this. Go to an undergrad school whose history department frequently sends students to top grad schools. Tell them that you want to take an advanced course which will bring you up to speed on the methods and concepts of historical research. Preferably not a historiography and methods course, but a hands-on course where you see how data is found and an argument put together, or at least a course where you read the best historians and the teacher takes their books apart and shows you how they got their results. And take the course.

Afterwards you may still feel the way you do now, but at least you will know what you're talking about.

Well, frankly without knowing the specifics of the methods I'm talking about you're making the wrong conclusion, and I didn't want to go into that much technical detail. Certainly the methods I'm talking about (DFT, CI, quantum monte carlo etc.) are tweaked and improved on (or completely supplanted by new methods), and there are a number of variations, but not on a case by case basis.

The methods are general enough to deal with most any system, in theory (really the bigger limiter is computation time, the best methods will produce really accurate results but are only applicable to small systems). The difference comes more in what parameters you are interested in getting right, and more generic differences in the system (like whether it's a solid or a molecule in vacuum, not whether it's Niobium or Vanadium + carbon, although admittedly atoms with open d orbitals are much harder to deal with then some small atoms like carbon or oxygen).

What I meant to say is that when you are dealing with realistic, large systems, it is computationally unfeasible to do the most fundamental (and accurate) calculations with the most accurate methods. Instead people develop models that usually ignore alot of details, and yet still get reasonable results for the specific parameters they are interested in.

And I don't see that biologists will necceserily not be able to do that. There's not much choice anyways, since at this point you'd be hard pressed to do a really good ab-initio calculation on a simple protein, much less a cell or an organism, which are so much bigger then anything we can deal with from basic physics laws that without radical changes in computing will never be computable.

See, to me that's just irrelevant, Coriolis. Physics gets better results because it studies simpler things which are easy to get good results about. I did throw in a little quibble about how physics has become less-predictive recently, but that's not my real point. Basically, biologists study different things than physicists, and use different methods, and get different kinds of results. The "Who is more scientific?" argument is for true believers and teenagers.

The "Who is more scientific?" argument is for true believers and teenagers.

As Josh alludes, that's just the current fashion among philosophers and people who want to raise the status of their specialization.

It's been around since before I was born, and I'm old.

Hey, this is just an opinion poll.

Since I am the head of a family of physicians (and one black sheep, a physics grad student) I can authoritativly state that medicine is not a science. Applied biology, applied physics, applied chemistry, etc. is more appropriate, but only a few physicians actually indulge in pure research. The authors of the "study" shown above were just trying out their new polling software as best I can see as the original question has no validity.

That being said, the reason that Medicine received top billing is that lack of any definition of the word "scientific" left those who answered the poll to say what their grandmother would say, "Oh you are a physicist, you're not a real doctor." The only persons with graduate credentials resulting from studying science that most meet are physicians or dentists.

A meaningless poll.