“All science is either physics or stamp collecting.” —Ernest Rutherford
In theory, can’t chemistry be reduced to the principles of quantum mechanics applied to large atomic structures? After all, chemical reactions are just defined by the exchange of electrons and other interactions at the quantum scale. Isn’t chemistry really just specific instances of physics problems?
And biology — isn’t it just defined by chemical reactions within living bodies? DNA is nothing more than a molecule; the body is just a complex, breathing, thinking chemical system. And if it can be reduced to chemistry, as we’ve demonstrated, it can also be reduced to physics.
And psychology, isn’t it just applied biology — hormones and brain chemistry and the occasional external substance? And sociology, just applied psychology? And everything else, just physics viewed through several layers and lenses of applications? Certainly physicists
could do any of these things — they could solve these systems by using the right math and variables — but why would they? That’s just bookkeeping, sorting out the curious details when physics is applied and subject to various initial conditions. We physicists are concerned with the more fundamental questions of the universe, discovering the only true novelties.
Let the stamp collectors and bookkeepers do their things, even if secretly, we think we can do it better.
Allow me to break character for a moment — this conceited reductionism is not limited to physics students. Though their field’s positioning as the most fundamental and “pure” science leaves them especially susceptible to this line of reasoning, the most militant practitioners in any scientific discipline seem compelled to look down on some other field to strengthen the relevance of their own. Mathematicians look down on physicists, who look down on chemists, who look down on biologists, who look down on psychologists. Scientists look down on their engineering counterparts because of the College of Engineering’s slight sacrifice in theoretical depth for applicability, and engineers reciprocally look down on their pure science counterparts for the the College of Letters and Science’s generally more flexible course load and somewhat lower salaries.
As one descends through the scientific hierarchy, the sense of distance from fundamentals is accompanied by a perception of decreasing intelligence. Math itself — abstract, difficult, inscrutable and practiced by the strangest sorts — is seen as almost external to the scientific structure entirely. Physics — applying calculus, linear algebra, topology and generally quite a generous helping of math — is a notch beneath it. Chemistry, somewhat less quantitative, is a notch below that. The more math you do, the more intelligent you are. The more esoteric and disjoint from human life, the more pure and powerful the subject.
Looking backward up the scale of purity, scientific zealots are still able to rationalize a sense of primacy even over more fundamental fields. When the chemists look at the physicists and the physicists look at the mathematicians, each carries a general sense of “who cares?”
To quote Richard Feynman, “Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation.” While mathematics is used in physics to describe behaviors, the behaviors have an existence of their own. Real science is derived from empirical observations, is defined by interpretation of experiment. In the absence of this Baconian element, mathematicians can’t describe anything of the natural world. For the purpose of physical observation, math for its own sake lacks any useful insights; it is a tool for quantification, nothing more.
A similar argument exists against physics in relation to chemistry. Attempting to understand all of chemistry by solving quantum mechanical systems would be an absurdly pointless task. Viewing phenomena with a larger interpretive lens, at a somewhat more macro scale as in the models of the field, is the only way to understand them and arrive at useful conclusions. Physics is useful as connective tissue, its approximations weaving together observations to construct a generalized model, but looking at it as its own field — who really cares?
And so the reductionist superiority complex inductively descends through the sciences. While this manifests itself largely in jocular ribs at one another (my physics professors can’t resist a joke about mathematicians when treating derivatives as fractions), on some level, this is how many of us really feel. Otherwise, there wouldn’t be string theorist Michio Kaku spouting nonsense about evolutionary biology on TV or microbiologists dismissing psychology in newspapers as “not a real science.” Of course, subjectively, each of us wouldn’t be studying what we are unless we thought it was the most interesting field available to us. But for those proudest sectionalists among us, it must be tiring to be constantly worrying about whose intellectual dick is or isn’t bigger — just give it a rest!
Albert Hsiung writes the Monday column on STEM student culture. Contact him at ahsiung@dailycal.org.