Experiment vs. Theory: Where Did It All Go Wrong?

Interesting question - my inkling would be that the truly great physicists (eg Newton and Einstein) have a bit of both. This is similar to Lee Smolin's idea in 'The Trouble With Physics' about seers versus craftspeople.

People that can do both are really few and far between, but they often wind up being exceedingly influential. Witness two real giants from the mid-20th century who made deep contributions to both disciplines: Fermi and Bardeen. As far as I can tell, the time of the dabbler in both realms is over, as the specialization required to reach the cutting-edge is considerably more significant, and that getting too deep into one way of approaching the world seriously inhibits the other. This is perhaps explained best by a quote from Yogi Berra:

In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

I did 2/3 of my thesis work on experiments before realizing I'm better at theory. That experimental background has served me well: The theoretical questions that I pose these days involve asking what the fundamental limits are to how precisely certain things can be measured, or how much information can be extracted in certain situations.

It is still possible to do both theory and experiment at the cutting edge, although admittedly not if you want to do particle physics. In quantum information there are several examples. Raymond Laflamme, currently director of IQC in Waterloo, started out as a theorist and made influential contributions to the theory of quantum error correction, but he also works on experiments in NMR implementations. Manny Knill is also a very good theorist, but he has recently started playing with ion traps. I guess the lesson is that, if you want to do both theory and experiment, then it is better to choose a field that has not been around for many decades, so that the amount of material that you need to master is manageable.

The theory-experimental divide in other fields is not as stark as it is in physics. For example, there is a reasonably large and influential number of experimental biologists who started their careers in theoretical physics or applied mathematics. Also, engineers seem to be able to bridge this divide far more easily.

Fermi is a bit of a unique genius. I don't remember any other comparable scientist who was both good in theory and in experiment.

Other great physicists of that time were already pretty much divided: Bohr was a theoretic physicist and Rutherford was a great experimentalist. Einstein was a pure theoretic physicist.

Earlier scientists were a bit more mixed. Maxwell was a bit of both. Ditto for Lord Kelvin.

You should check out Ursula DeYoung's "A Vision of Modern Science". Robert Tyndall's a useful case study on when and why the theory/experiment division occurred.

Thanks for the link :o)

I want to put in a good word for Heisenberg because I made the story very short. I too had to suffer through several "Praktika" which is how the experimental physics exercises are still called today in Germany. The problem with these Praktika is that they are often equipped with old, partly broken, missing or malfunctioning things, and they are terribly uninspiring to say the least. They leave you with zero room for creativity, unless you use your creativity to not make the experiment at all (then you learn a valuable lesson in how to fake data). Heisenberg too found himself in such a situation and wasn't interested enough to track down the missing equipment. Of course that doesn't really excuse his lack of knowledge about microscopes, but it does explain his lack of enthusiasm.

That having been said, the issue you talk about is yet another aspect of specialization. This is a natural thing to happen both in communities as well as in ecosystems. It becomes problematic only if those who don't specialize can't survive. This is problematic because you need them to keep things together.

Alex Besogonov: "Einstein was a pure theoretic physicist."

For a pure theorist he was very good with experiments. He didn't do much "scientific" experiments, because he was busy with commercial endeavours. Not just the Einstein-Szilard refrigerator, but also his gyrocompass, made by Anschütz. It was so good that by the beginning of WW2 all Navies used it, except those that spoke English. (Kind of ironic for a pacifist like Einstein...) The royalties from the compass, cleverly rerouted via a mailbox company in the Netherlands, were enough to keep him going in style after he was kicked out of Germany.

@Bee: Maybe the lesson from the "Praktika" has something to do with maintenance of equipment...

The self-regard of mathematicians is always a problem as they will always promote theory over reality. Unfortunately in the UK the replacement for Richard Dawkins as the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science in Oxford is Marcus du Sautoy. He's a nice guy and bright but he knows very little about science and doesn't understand the core of the scientific approach. He thinks mathematics is a science - no, it isn't, it's a different way of working, it's not based on observation and testing of the real world, its core is internal consistency and a certain aesthetic. And with that one-eyed view, he thinks the only proper science is that which a mathematician can understand. Some stuff is too complex for mathematics and mathematicians at present, that does not make it valueless, it makes it interesting!

It's intriguing how the puff from physicists suggesting that their hyper-expensive machines are really important in getting them huge amounts of money while it is much more difficult to get funds for the softer life and earth sciences which are far more fundamental to survival of life on earth, health and happiness than the number of GeV in a Higgs boson.

Wouldn't it be revolutionary to call for undergraduate programs in physics to 'co-value' formalism instruction and laboratory instruction?