Quantum Pontiff Dave Bacon preaches the Word:
One thing that bugs the heck out of me, is when I hear particle physicists talk about their field as if it is all of physics. I have a great love of particle physics, so I'm not dissing the field at all, nor arguing that it isn't more fundamental, but it rubs me the wrong way to disregard all of the rest of physics that is currently going on. This especially irritates me since it gives students the wrong impression that the only exciting physics is in particle physics.
Can I get an "Amen!"?
I sometimes wonder if people in other disciplines have the same problem. Not being dissed by particle physicists-- everybody gets that-- but some sub-field within the discipline acting as if it's the only interesting thing going on. Do developmental biologists strut around bio meetings as if they're the only ones doing worthwhile work? Do medical chemists divide chemistry into "drug development" and "stamp collecting?"
Inquiring minds want to know.
(The quoted passage is a humorous prelude to a more serious point, which I'll take up in a later post.)
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In programming its certainly like that - languages are always products of fashion and popularity more than just pragmatism.
which is a problem because it means programmers are constantly working with immature products, libraries, and languages, often in places it doesn't belong.
Ruby for example - its the "next big thing" and "incredibly productive", but aside from Rails for web/ajax development, it has no UI code whatsoever, and some of its other libraries are missing features that other environments have very well established, tested, mature implementations of. And Ruby suddenly showed up just as the LAST big scripting language (python) finally got mature enough to be able to do "real" work in. so suddenly we're all (if we're interested in popularity contests) working back in an immature language just as we finally got the last immature language to grow up.
When every tool is a hammer, every problem looks like your left thumb...
I see it in the messaging and computer security fields all the time.
I have certainly seen in Physics that "anything outside of the subfield I'm working on is uninteresting." I see it not just from particle physicists, but also from condensed matter physicsts (from some of whom I've gotten the impression that "particle physics is last century's physics" and the insistence that a department that isn't >50% condensed matter isn't competetive).
It even happens within astronomy. I was doing cosmology stuff when I started at Vanderbilt, and from one or two people received a very strong message that cosmology was the "worst sort of astronomy" and "not rigorous science." Meanwhile, the cosmologists (called "asshole cosmologists" by one nearby stars guy I knew in the last year) think that anything at z of less than 1 is uninteresting. The galactic astronomers hate the extragalactic astronomers, the X-ray astronomers hate the optical astronomers, the long-time astronomers hate the particle-physicists-turned-astronomer, etc. etc. etc.
It's all very so tiresome. Given that there are people out there who hate science altogether, and others who don't hate it but just don't know much about it or are afraid of it, the last thing we need is to fall upon each other bickering amongst ourselves, when we have so much in common....
-Rob
Yes, it is all very silly, but it is not just true in science. It is just the nature of the way people are.
Maybe it is best to settle it all on the court!
-cvj
The same phenomenon appears in the social sciences, such as Anthropology. Some of the anthropologists recognize the work of all other anthropologists, but there are also some that believe that social-cultural, archaeology, or linguistics are the only fields of interest. I am a bioanthropologist, but I do not view the other fields as less interesting to some. I do not find them overly interesting, but it is all good research that needs to be explored.
Apparently, all electrical engineers work on Intel and AMD microprocessors.
(Except the vast majority of us, who actually don't.)
In academic CS, (as well, I'm sure as most fields in which there is a subfield called "theory") the theorists look down on anything applicable as "mere application details", and the non-theorists look down on the theory as "useless".
Now, at this point I'm supposed to say "Both are wrong, of course." However, I don't believe that. I believe that both are CORRECT. It's just a matter of what you care about.
There's this annoying bickering between molecular biologists, geneticists, biochemists on one side and zoologists, ecologists and botanists on the other. Some deride the latter field as "birds in the forest biology" and imply it's outdated.
There is some as well between cell biologists, biochemists, molecular geneticists and structural biologists. The lines between all of them though are becoming more and more blurred so it lessening. I do know a few structural biologists who are upset by biochemistry labs doing structural work. Wet labs v. computational labs has become a bigger one along with traditional v. systems (big) biology.
Hard rock geology (Mineralogy, petrology, geochemistry, geophysics, structure) vs. soft rock geology (Paleontology, stratigraphy, sedimentology, geomorphology).
Well the particle physics experimentalists get the same treatment from the the particle physics theorists, who do not think an experiment is worthwhile unless it tests the theories that they currently obsess about. Heavy quark physics cannot tell us anything new about the Lagrangian therefore it is not worth doing even though there is much that is not yet understood.
There are clearly big obvious questions that need to be answered, but little puzzles sometimes lead to breakthroughs. Everyone knew that the universe was decelerating until some try to measure the rate and found it was accelerating.
Everyone knew that the universe was decelerating until some try to measure the rate and found it was accelerating.
Heck, the better part of a century before that, everybody knew that the Universe was static until Hubble up and measured redshifts and found that it was expanding...!
-Rob
A visiting scientist once told a group of us (when I was at another institution) that "all the good scientists work on cosmology, of course" (I paraphrase). He was serious. And a cosmologist. I forget what his claim to fame at the time was.
The institution happened to be quite strong in cosmology, the people at the table happened to all not work in cosmology, at least not as a primary research field.
Some of them were also quite good.
Anyway, clearly the only astro subfield that matters is, er, pulsars! That's it. Pulsars.
And of those, only millisecond pulsars.
And really only the binary millisecond pulsars.
In globular clusters...
I am an medicinal chemist. There is a limited amount of snobbery (with regard to famous people/good groups/fancy reagents/impressive chemical transformation) but I think there is not as much putdown to people in other chemistry fields. Maybe the cause of this is that chemistry actually is 90% of stamp-collecting and engineering. Eventually, you have to synthesize your chemicals and characterise them by spectroscopy (which needs some qualified people of shamanic persuation to take good care of these NMRs, LC/MS, HPLCs).
So, you can have individual chemist puttin on some snotty show but it is not possible for a whole bucnh of chemists to pretend that their chemistry is more fundamental than somebody else. It depends on how beatiful and useful and difficult is what they have done but it is basicaly the same kind of work that other people can do too.
All the rest of mathematics is but a set of tools to be used in the service of number theory. But that's obvious, of course.