Alex Palazzo at The Daily Transcript has posted his lighthearted take on the disciplines within the life sciences. Over at Pharyngula, PZ Myers notes some important omissions while pointing out that the categories are more porous in real life. Meanwhile, Chad Orzel at Uncertain Principles sets out a taxonomy of physics specialties.
If you think I’m going to give you the geek chart for chemistry or philosophy of science, you must be daft.
There are good reasons for this. Even though chemists are generally pretty good at sorting themselves and others into the broad categories (organic chemist, inorganic chemist, physical chemist, analytic chemist, biochemist), these categories can end up telling you very little about what the chemists in them actually do. For example, my work was in physical chemistry. So, the organic chemist might venture:
You work with lasers?
No.
You do stuff with quantum mechanics?
No.
Uh, statistical mechanics then?
Nope.
There’s no reason to think I, as a physical chemist (dealing with kinetics and thermodynamics of far-from-equilibrium systems) wouldn’t be just as clueless about what the chemists in other groups — even in the same broad category of physical chemistry — are up to.
As well, there are lots of “crossover” types of chemists, doing physical organic chemistry, bioinorganic chemistry, biophysical chemistry, etc. — just the kind of blurring of boundaries that PZ notes in the life sciences. Plus, chemists love picking up cool tools and techniques and theoretical approaches from the neighbors — not just from other chemists, but from biologists and physicists and engineers.
So, the chances of being able to pick any given chemist out of a standardized chart are pretty low.
As for philosophers of science, there’s a similar diversity of approaches and objects of study. The one sorting principle that I tend to use is how much a philosopher of science cares about the details of actual scientific practice. Some care quite a lot, others not so much.
For the other geeks out there (or for those who observe or interact with geeks on a regular basis), how much do taxonomies or sorting principles help? Would it actually be valuable to have the complete series of wall-charts with geek specializations across the disciplines?
Or are they all just geeks?
Hackers observe that, above a certain critical level, intelligence, art, science and fun merge into a higher level of creative pleasure, where the process of obtaining the answer becomes more pleasurable than the answer itself, even given the introduction of being paid to find answers. They quote Andrew Wiles’ nine-year solo quest to prove Fermat’s Last Theorem as an example of this, as well as other examples from history.
I was talking about blurring boundaries between disciplines (and much, much more) just last week in class.