Thanks to a Facebook post by Physics Today magazine, I recently read this very topical essay by Veronique Greenwood over at undark.org.
Physicists at the Gate: Collaboration and Tribalism in Science
It’s pretty great. Go read it. OK, done?
It takes direct aim at people like me: physicists moving into complex established fields and feeling like we can do something useful because we know more math. The author’s use of “tribalism” in the title is a bit off in my opinion, but otherwise I find the discussion of the issue to be both accurate and comprehensive enough to qualify as standard reading for any physicists looking to branch out like this.
As I’ve started getting my feet wet in systems biology, I’ve tried to be particularly sensitive to the dynamic discussed in the essay, especially in understanding that before I’m even introduced as a physicist, I’m preceded in reputation by all of my colleagues whose naive arrogance has helped generate this stereotype of our field in the first place. For my own part, I just make a point of being respectful and humble. Most of importantly, I listen. I listen a lot. After all, even if I can’t yet understand what makes the biologists so excited about the questions they are asking, I can’t help but yield to the empirical fact that the global program of biologists pursuing basic curiosity-driven research according to what excites them and not me has been amazingly productive by whatever measure of productivity you care to use. It’s enough to keep anyone humble, even a physicist. So, I figure, if I listen, I might learn something.
That said, returning to the essay, it’s actually a bit of a myth that physicists only study simple things and that the success of the field is largely due to concentrating on problems that are easy enough to be approachable by mathematics. This may describe theoretical particle physicists, sure, but I can assure you that most working physicists are studying systems which are so complex that there is nearly no hope of ever understanding them from a reductionist, first principles description of the system’s microscopic constituents. (In fact, not even theoretical particle physics is like that, but that’s another essay!) In fact, our human experience with the everyday world of bulk matter is dominated by behaviors which are not even present in the basic constituents at all, but are somehow abstractly encoded in their arrangement. (They are “emergent”.) Physicists study the heck out these things because, just like every other scientist, we are motived in our work by studying the hardest questions we think we can make progress on. One doesn’t need to go to all the way to biology, ecology, and archeology to find problems which are historically contingent, intricately detailed, or otherwise just too hard to model as a spherical cow on a frictionless plane. We don’t even know how friction works.
Nevertheless, it’s true that part of the intellectual training and common culture of physicists is to look carefully at a system and then, once you think you’ve started to make some sense of it, start stripping away the unnecessary details until you’re left with the essential core of the problem. Then you start going at it with your great big toolbox of problem-solving tricks, some of which involve a fair bit of math. In general, this has been a massively successful program and is a big part of what makes physicists so employable outside of academic research.
The problem with this approach is that the notion of which details are essential and which are unnecessary depends in a fundamental way on the questions you are asking about the system. The questions you ask depend as much on you and your prior intellectual biases — your paradigm, in Kuhn’s sense — as they do on the system. And, if you’re trained as a physicist and looking at a new system outside your past experience, you’re likely to decide that the unnecessary details are the ones which you don’t yet know how to ask questions about. You’re likely to decide that the interesting questions are the ones amenable to your toolbox. You may even dismiss whole lines of questioning that form the basis of entire research fields as “uninteresting details”. You are unlikely to convince the people already working in those fields to drop their extant successes and take up your glorious new insights.
In other words, your hard work will have no impact, another wasted effort on the scrap heap of scientific history. I don’t know about you, but I’m not in science for the fame and fortune. I’m here because I want all those irretrievable hours of my life that I’ve spent on work to amount to something. I want my efforts to have positive impact on the human condition. So, to avoid the honest-to-goodness tragedy of science without impact, I’ve been trying my best to listen to what people who already know what they are doing think is important, and then searching hard for the words to put my own work in their context. I don’t just want to start doing science the way a biologist would, of course, because that would defeat the point of being an interdisciplinary voice. But, it seems important to express my outsider voice using insider words in order to be heard. At least, that’s the plan for now. We’ll so how well this turns out in time.
If nothing else, all this listening is doing great things for expanding my world view, and that’s opened up whole new avenues for thinking about my physics problems. So, there’s another advantage of not just crashing through gates like a naive barbarian and demanding to be heard: it actually makes me a better physicist. Who knew?
