One can’t help but wonder what the Chemistry person was planning to say, and whether they are currently desperately trying to figure out a different tack. (“Lessee… drugs? No, the bio people are really more responsible for that. Green revolution! …unsustainable long-term ecological disaster, particularly hitting the third world, mainly being mitigated by abandoning chemical fertilizers. Not a good idea. How about… plastic! Food additives? Leaded gasoline! Shutup shutup shutup. Maybe I can just chomp my cyanide pill and avoid the whole thing. Wait, this is just a Tic Tac — dammit!“)
I think the quote is one of those things attributed to every possible source. Sort of along the lines of “you can judge a country by how they treat [fill in the blank]”, which IIRC has never been credibly proven to have been said by any of the people who are variously claimed to have said it (particularly Gandhi).
(The one about “young man, if I had wanted to learn the names of things, I would have been a botanist”, though, was apparently actually said to Leon Lederman by some particular particle physicist, I can’t remember which one offhand. Again IIRC, he mentions it in a footnote in The God Particle.)
Loftysays
Chemistry gave us the elements in vastly more detail than the philosophers did. And superior bicycle tires.
Chemists can’t claim that one; farmers worked out alcohol on their own at least as long ago as ancient Mesopotamia — and they were equal opportunity employers for bartenders, too. (Now distilled liquor, that was chemists, or at least alchemists during the “let’s stop wasting time on trying to perform magic and start doing things which actually work” period when they were making the transition… of course, when distilled liquor showed up in Europe it was a scourge on society approximately equivalent to crack cocaine in America, people drank themselves into poverty, sold their children, and frequently drank themselves to death, so I’m not sure a chemist would actually want to claim it, but that was long ago, all the victims are past being able to complain, and at least it’s a legitimate achievement.)
Daz365365 .says
I’m not sure where it comes from but I like:
If it moves, it’s biology
If it smells, it’s chemistry
If it doesn’t work, it’s physics
themann1086says
As a physicist, I love this comic :) very funny, with the benefit of being true
It is true that knowledge of biology was essential to the sharp reduction in deaths from infectious disease. But I have to point out that social science and policy were just as important. Knowledge about pathogens and the immune system wouldn’t have gotten us very far without implementation of public health measures. Sanitary sewers and water treatment plants also require civil engineering. It’s a team effort.
Kevin Anthoneysays
Also, the cartoon neglects the possibility of biologists doing evil, such as genetically engineering a virus. Or a Kraken, in a deep underground lair in Morris, Minnesota.
To be fair, that last one’s pretty unlikely, though. Who would do a thing like that?
Iansays
Agreed with #10. I teach physics and am ever its enthusiastic promoter, but it’s a fair point.
Larrysays
Yeah, but bio populated an island with reincarnations of the dinosaurs make from frogs, not thinking about whether they should but only that they could. Those dinos then found a way to breed and ended up killing Newman. Game, set, match, bio! Physics rules!
nonsecksualnym (late:polishsalami)says
I’ve been a science nerd since about 10, and still am. Yet as I’ve grown older I’ve come to believe that philosophy and art trump all.
Fetchez la Vachesays
One physicist, here, who has never subscribed to this (or any) disciplinary value hierarchy. If anything, I’ve got severe evolution envy (wish physics had such an amazing idea!). The stamp collecting gibe always struck me as appalling arrogance. I’ve often wished that I could have several lifetimes so I could also become a geologist, an astronomer, a …
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))says
re @8:
Vicar, [ooohhh: offline. even so…] I did not say chemists DEVELOPED alcohol, but surely Chemists will OWN it, for all it’s “chemical magic”. But then again, maybe I gave that Chemist too much credit. He could have just about to recite the famous motto: “Better living through CHEMISTRY”.
blgmntssays
I get that it is not meant to be taken seriously (I hope), but:
Chemical weapons were used in WW1 with the result that they were not used in WW2 because even the villains of WW2 were too horrified. Biological weapons were used in modern times during WW2 by Japan. Both types of weapons are still researched (purely defensively, of course). Then there is the potential use in terrorism.
On the other hand: How many of the tools used in Biology/Medicine and Chemistry were only made possible by Physics? Of the top of my head: Crystallography, different types of microscope, X-rays/radiation, types of tomography (superconductivity), many different lasers.
On the third hand (oooh, spoooky): How many Physicists would have died as toddlers without the fruits of biological and chemical research?
There may be some unhealthy competition between these sciences and I think this is the point of the comic, not a take on physicists. It all boils down to quantum and relativity, anyway [1].
[1] Yes, I had to.
Dark Jaguarsays
You need the whole thing. Physics are “the rules”. Can’t play the game without knowing the rules, or you’ll probably end up breaking something along the way. Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and so on are how those rules work together to make new stuff. There’s knowing how a lever works, and there’s knowing how to build a car.
There’s this annoying trope in sci-fi stories where some fanciful author feels the need to make “love” a fundamental force of the universe. (It’s never “curiosity” or “empathy” I notice, always romantic love, because apparently artists don’t understand any other emotion than whatever random fling they just got over.) Interstellar is just the latest to do it.
I’d argue this. Being a “fundamental force” doesn’t make love more important. It makes it simplistic, basic. Isn’t it far more interesting for love to be something that the universe didn’t have so it had to be MADE? Love isn’t just some particle or wave, love is an emergent property like everything else about our minds that’s in any way interesting. Love is complicated, made up of so very many interactions of a living system, and it needs all that to keep going. Isn’t that a far more romantic concept?
I recall reading somewhere that the “stamp collecting” quote, whoever said it, is misconstrued. The idea being that in science you’re either trying to figure out how and why things work, or you’re just naming and categorizing stuff. The word “physics” in this sense (possibly translated from German?) has a much broader meaning than as a specific academic discipline, and the quote wasn’t meant to disparage other disciplines.
But I can’t vouch for that interpretation. I’m curious if anyone else has heard it this way.
Rob Grigjanissays
Area Man @21:
The word “physics” in this sense (possibly translated from German?)
Most likely translated from Kiwi, as Rutherford was from NZ. As for interpretations, I favour “people sometimes say silly things”.
uri4says
Wait, are we taking this seriously? Randall is clearly commenting on the insecuritiy and humorlessness of biologists.
But, if you want to play that way:
How many of the instruments used by biologists are attributable to the work of physicists?
How much of the analysis done by biologists can be traced back to methods developed for the analysis of problems in the physics of inanimate systems?
And, not for nothing, putting comics on your office door always struck me as the equivalent to playing a comedy album at a party. Just saying.
Rob Grigjanissays
Dark Jaguar @19:
Physics are “the rules”. Can’t play the game without knowing the rules, or you’ll probably end up breaking something along the way. Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and so on are how those rules work together to make new stuff.
Every science has its ‘rules’. This sort of thinking is a disservice to chemistry, biology, etc.
The fact is that every science comes with its own set of fundamental laws. These laws are strictly reducible to ‘lower-level’ laws in a philosophical sense, but the lower-level laws don’t directly lead to the higher-level fundamental ones. Thus, an understanding of the lower-level laws, no matter how thorough, does not automatically imply an understanding of the higher-level ones.
tbtabbysays
The moment I saw this comic, I knew I’d see it on Pharyngula later.
chigau (違う)says
uri4 #23 Randall is clearly commenting on the insecuritiy and humorlessness of biologists.
clearly?
Most likely translated from Kiwi, as Rutherford was from NZ.
But it’s unclear if he was the originator of the quote. As near as I can tell, it was first attributed to him decades after his death, and there are unsourced variants that mean different things.
At any rate, “people sometimes say silly things” is as good an interpretation as any.
Fair Witnesssays
Just you wait. Biology will have its Apocalypse moment, soon enough.
moarscienceplzsays
The Vicar #2
One can’t help but wonder what the Chemistry person was planning to say, and whether they are currently desperately trying to figure out a different tack.
I recommend The Poisonser’s Handbook. A century ago, murder by poison was common and often impossible to prove. That is no longer true. You might argue that it was medical doctors and biologists who achieved this, but the chemists had to understand the chemical nature of the poisons before the medical people could do their work.
nathanieltaggsays
It’s going on my office door too…
and I’m a physicist.
How I have hated that stupid stamp-collecting quote. Happily, our current majors have never seen or heard of it; that poster seems to have disappeared, thank goodness.
How many of the instruments used by biologists are attributable to the work of physicists?
How much of the analysis done by biologists can be traced back to methods developed for the analysis of problems in the physics of inanimate systems?
How much of the knowledge used by physicists can be traced back to random people randomly cobbling facts and ideas together until it sort of worked? Checkmate, Physicists!
More seriously, can we please stop the pointless attachment of supposed breakthroughs* to a certain discipline? Every time I hear it it strikes me as exceedingly childish, not to mention short-sighted. Especially when acutal scientists do it, who really should know better.**
If you want to get all smug and swell your heads:
– The physicists provided the basic knowledge
– The biologists figured out the problem
– The chemists made the solution
– The engineers figured out how to make enough for everybody
There. And it works for both medicine and weapons of mass destruction, so it’s fair all around.
*Rarely a discrete event but rather years of research seen as a breakthrough at the moment somone finally got a working model.
**Not intended a criticism of todays XKCD, which, being a webcomic, is lovely.
anymsays
#32, komarov
More seriously, can we please stop the pointless attachment of supposed breakthroughs to a certain discipline? Every time I hear it it strikes me as exceedingly childish, not to mention short-sighted. Especially when acutal scientists do it, who really should know better.
The problem is compounded by the fact that you don’t have to go back very far before you start finding ‘omnidisciplinary scientists’… many of history’s ‘great physicists’ were also ‘great chemists’ and ‘great engineers’ and so on and so forth. What sort of a scientist was Robert Hooke, for example?
It was Enrico Fermi who told Lederman, “Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.”
chigau (違う)says
One could do alot of analyses of comics taped to university professors’ office doors.
Won’t someone think of the InternetPsychologists?
A momentary lapse...says
You need the whole thing. Physics are “the rules”. Can’t play the game without knowing the rules, or you’ll probably end up breaking something along the way. Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and so on are how those rules work together to make new stuff.
So, starting from quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, show that a zebra wants to eat grass. You may also reference general relativity should gravity become relevant to the solution.
Rob Grigjanissays
A momentary lapse… @37:
starting from quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, show that a zebra wants to eat grass.
Well, there are penguin diagrams. I think zebras require a non-perturbative approach, since they’re kind of nervous.
anymsays
#37, A momentary lapse…
So, starting from quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, show that a zebra wants to eat grass.
That seems a bit uncharitable; the fact that we do not have a complete chain of coherent, connected theories joining Feynman diagrams with savannah ecosystems doesn’t mean that such a chain could not exist. Perhaps you’d like you suggest at what point biology is cleanly and unambiguously separated from physics? Anyway, there’s (inevitably) another XKCD which seems germane… https://xkcd.com/435/
The silliness is to be found in the “Can’t play the game without knowing the rules”. Modern physics is modern. Science is thousands of years old.
slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))says
#32, komarov
More seriously, can we please stop the pointless attachment of supposed breakthroughs to a certain discipline? Every time I hear it it strikes me as exceedingly childish, not to mention short-sighted. Especially when acutal [sic] scientists do it, who really should know better.
Komorov, I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, maybe in your pocket. No, your OTHER pocket.
Let me help find it, I’ll look over here, while you look over there.
<high pitched> “here, here. Come here little sense of humor, I got a cookie here, waiting for you…”
I think a “Degree Off” would include a pretty hefty helping of humanities scholars, unless this is some kind of divisional playoff for the hard scientists.
(Apologies for misspelling your handle above; it was a typo.)
Vicar, [ooohhh: offline. even so…] I did not say chemists DEVELOPED alcohol, but surely Chemists will OWN it, for all it’s “chemical magic”. But then again, maybe I gave that Chemist too much credit. He could have just about to recite the famous motto: “Better living through CHEMISTRY”.
If chemists are permitted to claim undistilled alcohol as their own because “we didn’t create it or discover it but it’s in our field”, then by the same logic the biologists can claim all life as their own, including all of humanity, and the physicists can claim the entire universe.
@#29: moarscienceplz
You might argue that it was medical doctors and biologists who achieved this, but the chemists had to understand the chemical nature of the poisons before the medical people could do their work.
I have The Poisoner’s Handbook and have read it twice. (Great book and highly recommended, but it really needed more proofreading than it got before publication.) I’d say that neither field could claim all of those forensic tests all by itself. Some of them are closer to chemistry than others, but practically all of them (possibly excluding arsenic) involve some definite biological work as well — remember how often the book mentioned animal testing?
(If you want an interesting book on distilled alcohol, by the way, try The Much-Lamented Death of Madame Geneva. It’s really about the English struggles with the stuff, specifically, but it’s very interesting and the parallels to the modern War On Drugs are astonishing; the author generally doesn’t try to dot so large an “i”, but the facts are so blatant that they don’t have to. It ends with some modern stuff — primarily the American Prohibition period, IIRC — so it may eventually dip into that. It’s been a while since I read it.)
On the other hand: How many of the tools used in Biology/Medicine and Chemistry were only made possible by Physics? Of the top of my head: Crystallography, different types of microscope, X-rays/radiation, types of tomography (superconductivity), many different lasers.
Sorry to double post you on this point — I had some urgent physics biz to deal with between composing and posting and inadvertently asked a question you’d already answered.
@PZ #31, @ Caine #34 — imagine smilies inserted where needed. (I will try not to check back to learn into what part of a physicist you’d insert a smilie)
I like to think that the next panel has the biologist and the physicist piling onto the chemist
In what regard do biologists typically hold chemists? My tribe (a particular kind of solid state physics) tend to be contemptuous of … well … everyone who isn’t of the body. But we hold a special chemists in special disesteem. We also (speaking for my age cohort and specialization) frequently imagine that we could be biologists. At AVS meetings, whenever a biologist drops in to present, we gather in front of the poster and say “biology seems fun, bet we could do that”
shadowsays
@14 Larry:
Jurassic Park, really?
What about Gojira? Mutated biology ripping its way through Tokyo — Biology for the win — Life finds a way.
diannesays
Biological weapons were used in modern times during WW2 by Japan.
Use of anthrax as a biological weapon was considered by Britain during WW2 but they never actually used it. The person who came up with the plan to bomb Germany with anthrax was knighted, though, so I don’t think it was moral horror that kept them from preceding.
diannesays
Duh. Proceeding. Can’t brain today.
A. Rsays
Deployment was the issue with bioweapons in WWII. The Japanese solved it for plague with the flea bomb, but anthrx was a slightly harder nut to crack.
A. Rsays
Oh, and uri4 @44, I really, really doubt you could just “do biology”. In fact, you are a perfect example of what this webcomic is trying to demonstrate. I’m a virologist specializing in the molecular biology of a relatively small group of viruses. I am capable of doing productive work on a fairly large number of RNA viruses, but my focus is on only a few. However, if you put a DNA virus in front of me, I would be as lost as a new grad student for the first month or so while I learned the biology of that particular virus. Ask me to do hardcore bacteriology, and I would be entirely useless. The point being that biology is such a complex field that even people within the same specialty (microbiology) are not able to just “do” the work of another sub-specialty within that specialty. I doubt any sort of physicist would be capable of designing the sort of experiment needed to examine the role of the siRNA response in viral polymerase fidelity.
carliesays
In the vein of how fights with siblings are much more vicious than fights with friends, put an organismal biologist and a molecular biologist in a room together and see how many janitors it takes to clean up the blood later.
uri4says
@A.R.
Oh, and uri4 @44, I really, really doubt you could just “do biology”. In fact, you are a perfect example of what this webcomic is trying to demonstrate…
I know you are, but what am I?
Seriously, the physicist in the comic is playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture — when the biologist fires up a powerpoint presentation and tries to win the debate by quantifying the good her discipline has done in the world.
The gag is NOT that physicists are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Or maybe you are going double-secret-meta-ironic; winding us up by posting in the character of a drearily stolid and literal “biologist”. I which case, touché.
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
Of course, the math people have been enabling all of the other science folk. No one gets blamed without mathematicians getting a share.
So what you’re saying is, a solution exists?
The gag is NOT that physicists are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Yeah, actually, knowing the history of XKCD, it is.
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
Chemistry gave us the elements in vastly more detail than the philosophers did. And superior bicycle tires.
And personal lubricants. :D :D :D
Yes, philosophers versus chemists brings up Yet Another Favorite XKCD cartoon: Polonium-bending
If I ever run a fantasy tabletop game, I’m going to have someone open a gate to the Elemental Plane of Hydrogen.
Also, from
My tribe (a particular kind of solid state physics) tend to be contemptuous of … well … everyone who isn’t of the body. But we hold a special chemists in special disesteem. We also (speaking for my age cohort and specialization) frequently imagine that we could be biologists. At AVS meetings, whenever a biologist drops in to present, we gather in front of the poster and say “biology seems fun, bet we could do that”
The gag is NOT that physicists are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
The self-awareness is weak in this one.
woozysays
Seriously, the physicist in the comic is playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture — when the biologist fires up a powerpoint presentation and tries to win the debate by quantifying the good her discipline has done in the world.
Right. Exactly.
The gag is NOT that physicists are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Huh? What… didn’t you just say…? Let me go back and read it again…
Seriously, the physicist in the comic is playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture —
Um….? Okay. So I guess you are so entrenched in being a arrogant dismissive asshole, that when you are an arrogant dismissive asshole, and someone makes a joke portraying you as an arrogant dismissive asshole, your are so caught up in being an arrogant dismissive asshole that you don’t even realize that someone is calling you an arrogant dismissive asshole.
Let’s go over this again:
Seriously, the physicist in the comic is playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture —
Yes. Playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture is BEING AN ARROGANT DISMISSIVE ASSHOLE!!
when the biologist fires up a powerpoint presentation and tries to win the debate by quantifying the good her discipline has done in the world.
Right. Because her field actually did something useful this century while physicists just like to dismiss her as “stamp collecting”. She *IS* the good guy in this strip and she *DID* win on legitimate grounds. The physicist is simply a jerk.
chigau (違う)says
The gag is that undergraduates with a major in physics are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Right, uri4?
karpadsays
Far be it from me to correct the mighty Physicist, Uri, as a mere Humanities, but yeah, no, you are super, super wrong.
Let’s examine basic joke structure, shall we? Set up, Punchline. Everything else is window dressing. Let us set aside the WORDSWORDSWORDS and get to the key sentences then:
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting” is the set up.
the punchline is “I thought this was supposed to be fun” “no (fun) is stamp collecting.”
He’s being accused of being a dilettante for not regarding science with an appropriate gravitas and thinking of it as a source of quaint anecdotes rather than the shit with which we change the world.
But if you did biology, or comedy you would know that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but it dies in the process. EB White said it, who was, admittedly, also not a physicist.
A. Rsays
One more thing uri4, if you knew anything about xkcd, you would know to read the mouseover text. How do I know you didn’t? Because if you had read it, you wouldn’t be making the bombastic and unbelievably stupid arguments you’ve been vomiting at us.
woozysays
Well… let’s not forget that “We have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse while you’ve created a new one” is a pretty nifty zinger in itself. And the “you must be thinking of stamp collecting” is pretty dang funny. She isn’t humorless.
se habla espolsays
A question from a non-of-the-above: Has there ever been a physicist (or chemist, etc) who was not a biological artifact?
uri4says
Oh right — this is the internet.
@woozy
o I guess you are so entrenched in being a arrogant dismissive asshole, that when you are an arrogant dismissive asshole, and someone makes a joke portraying you as an arrogant dismissive asshole, your are so caught up in being an arrogant dismissive asshole that you don’t even realize that someone is calling you an arrogant dismissive asshole.
You win.
chigau (違う)says
A. R #57
That might be the problem.
But the mouseover doesn’t work on mobile devices.
However, xkcd has a mirrored site for mobile things.
That comic is here http://m.xkcd.com/1520/
you need to tap (alt-text)
Esteleth, RN's job is to save your ass, not kiss itsays
Xkcd’s frequent lampooning of physicists may have something to do with the fact that the guy who draws xkcd – Randall Munroe – is a former roboticist. He’s predominately an engineer.
woozysays
But the mouseover doesn’t work on mobile devices.
However, xkcd has a mirrored site for mobile things.
That comic is here http://m.xkcd.com/1520/
you need to tap (alt-text)
Or someone could just paste the mouse-over text: “I’M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE ‘SQUISHY SCIENCES’, I ASSUMED YOU’D BE A LITTLE HARDER.”
Xkcd’s frequent lampooning of physicists may have something to do with the fact that the guy who draws xkcd – Randall Munroe – is a former roboticist. He’s predominately an engineer.
He has a physics degree. He jokes about physicists’ supposed arrogance a LOT. I think it’s self-deprecation/recognition but also a form of apology/contrition. I think.
But seriously, to see this comic and to assume that it’s the biologist that is the butt of the joke is just plain delusional.
anymsays
#53, Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
If I ever run a fantasy tabletop game, I’m going to have someone open a gate to the Elemental Plane of Hydrogen.
The gag is that undergraduates with a major in physics are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
I don’t think it is just undergrads. The “everything is just physics and the rest of you are doing it wrong” thing also appears in grown-up physicists, too. See also, http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
Order of the Stick brings us osmium, silicon, titanium and chlorine elementals.
Ha. Six years before the first of those, the old webcomic Adventurers! (JRPG parody, particularly Final Fantasy) had the characters tasked with obtaining “the elemental relics”, which periodically got referenced as the characters advanced through the quest until they finally got them all. (Which, in true JRPG style, really didn’t have much to do with elements in any way. But it looked impressive.) (Then again, the Adventurers! universe always did have something of a problem with the whole idea of science…)
azhaelsays
In what regard do biologists typically hold chemists? My tribe (a particular kind of solid state physics) tend to be contemptuous of … well … everyone who isn’t of the body. But we hold a special chemists in special disesteem. We also (speaking for my age cohort and specialization) frequently imagine that we could be biologists. At AVS meetings, whenever a biologist drops in to present, we gather in front of the poster and say “biology seems fun, bet we could do that”
You can’t, i guarantee. Not without studying the subject as anybody else. Being a qualified physicist is not transferable to being a qualified biologist, period. The fact that you seem to think otherwise just shows that a) you don’t know biology for sure and b) you are a smarmy, self-important, delusional arsehole. Keep imagining that you can do biology and while you are at it, imagine that you are a real boy.
As a (sort of) chemist&biologist, i would not give up on green revolution so easily. The blame for why green revolution is not sustainable in long-term lies clearly at the feet of physicists, who failed to deliver renewable and cheap source of energy on time.
Of course all of the three fields above would not be able to discern measurement from background noise for fine things without the swiss knife of sciences – statistics.
erik333says
@67 Charly
Aye, clearly mathmaticians are the giants on whos shoulders scientists stand ;-) With the development of computers, they’ve finally gotten something in return.
As a (sort of) chemist&biologist, i would not give up on green revolution so easily. The blame for why green revolution is not sustainable in long-term lies clearly at the feet of physicists, who failed to deliver renewable and cheap source of energy on time.
Only if you were planning on growing everything hydroponically. Chemical fertilizers don’t merely face a problem of being unsustainable to manufacture in the long term, they actually end up destroying the microbiomes of soil by changing the chemistry of it, leaving it impoverished and drier in the long-term and vulnerable to minor problems which soils without chemical fertilizer would have been able to shrug off — possibly, in the long-enough (centuries) term, causing the soil to become completely unusable for crops, although this is obviously unproven, and desertification from climate change is more likely to cause the same effects before this becomes a serious issue. (Of course, climate change is also largely thanks to chemists, loosely speaking…) :P
Now, if any of you chemist/biologists figures out how to turn normal soil into Amazon-style black soil, then you’ll have worked out a major trick and deserve some applause. (And yes, I’m aware that this is being worked on.) Unfortunately, most biologists seem to want to go into GMOs, even though most GMOs which reach the market actually require more resources to grow than non-GM equivalents, thus making them accelerate climate change while being more vulnerable to it. (This is why, when people like PZ talk about how the anti-GMO crowd are so “anti-science”, I want to yell and throw things. GM crops are theoretically a way of dealing with climate change in the same sense that nuclear energy is a theoretically a way of dealing with pollution — it hasn’t worked yet, ever, even once, but the people who are in favor of it are never discouraged by the ever-increasing list of failures.)
jamiejagsays
I can think of only one response to this smug biologist:
Aye, clearly mathmaticians are the giants on whos shoulders scientists stand ;-) With the development of computers, they’ve finally gotten something in return.
On the other hand, they’ve probably all spontaneously burst into flames at your suggestion that tangible results ought to matter to them. D:
Now, if any of you chemist/biologists figures out how to turn normal soil into Amazon-style black soil
Dafuq? I could have sworn rainforest soil was notably poor-quality because all the nutrients were in the plants *reads*
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
This is why, when people like PZ talk about how the anti-GMO crowd are so “anti-science”, I want to yell and throw things.
The problem is that the “anti-GMO crowd” aren’t arguing that
most GMOs which reach the market actually require more resources to grow than non-GM equivalents, thus making them accelerate climate change while being more vulnerable to it
They’re flailing and screaming about how OH MAH GAWERD IT R NAWT TEH NACHURALS IT R EAT MAH BABBY!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!!!! FRANKENFOOOOOOOOOODDDDD D: D: D: D: D: D: D:
And yes, those fuckheads are anti-science. And worse, they’re doing active harm to the ability of rational concerns about GMOs-as-practiced to be voiced, heard, and addressed.
Rob Grigjanissays
Azkyroth @71:
I could have sworn rainforest soil was notably poor-quality because all the nutrients were in the plants
Oh, I didn’t see that The Vicar had already linked to that.
uri4says
@azhael #66
The fact that you seem to think otherwise just shows that a) you don’t know biology for sure and b) you are a smarmy, self-important, delusional arsehole. Keep imagining that you can do biology and while you are at it, imagine that you are a real boy
Why do I have to imagine that I am any kind of boy at all?
Since the irony filters seem to be set on “self-immolate”, I will write plainly:
As a long time reader of the comic, it seemed unlikely to me that Randall was saying something as trite as “physicists think biologists are dummies”. For me, the joke in the strip turns on the absurdly overblown response of the biologist to Cueball’s hackneyed “physics rules” routine. (And no, the alt text does not seem to me to be Randall stepping forward and saying “take that, thou arrogant arse!”. Rather it seems a further amplification of the already disproportionate response of the Bun-haired Woman)
For working scientists, the idea of abrupt and impenetrable boundaries between named disciplines (biology stops where physics begins, for instance) seems silly. In fact, it is falsified by a glance at the publications in almost any physics journal. Spectroscopists, microscopists crystallographers, (for instance) who trained as a physicists or chemists do work on problems in biology. When biologists have presented at the AVS, ECS, or ACS meetings I’ve attended, their work has been accessible and meaningful to me because they used tools and techniques that I understood. (An aside: as a grad student I had opportunities to work on projects with biologists, but was waved off by my adviser who — for reasons of his own — was eager to have a materials scientist on my committee)
As for the value of such cross-discipline efforts; Rosalind Franklin was a physical chemist, Francis Crick was a physicist., Maurice WIlkins was a physicist…
I do not know the circumstance under which Lord Rutherford made the remark about “stamp collecting”, but when I repeat it to my 200-level students (who do not usually include life science majors) I am explaining the reductive and material foundation of physics. It is a provocation, to be sure, but not an insult. “Ask enough ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions in ANY science,” I tell them “and you will find yourself back to what you are meant to learn in this class — looking at particles, fields, and potentials.”
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
Uri, you’re a fucking idiot.
Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Ysays
And between the absurd lengths of willful blindness and motivated circular reasoning you’ve demonstrated here, and the blinders that come with smugness at your level, I wouldn’t trust a single result that you had any hand in.
A. Rsays
As a long time reader of the comic, it seemed unlikely to me that Randall was saying something as trite as “physicists think biologists are dummies”. For me, the joke in the strip turns on the absurdly overblown response of the biologist to Cueball’s hackneyed “physics rules” routine. (And no, the alt text does not seem to me to be Randall stepping forward and saying “take that, thou arrogant arse!”. Rather it seems a further amplification of the already disproportionate response of the Bun-haired Woman)
Really? If you really are a long time reader, you would have seen all of the other jabs taken at arrogant physicists.
As for the value of such cross-discipline efforts; Rosalind Franklin was a physical chemist, Francis Crick was a physicist., Maurice WIlkins was a physicist…
Yes, Franklin was a p-chemist. So what? P-chem is an interdisciplinary field like biochem, and like biochem, depending on the individual lab, the work can be very chem, or very physics. As for Crick, he was just as much a physicist as I ma a pathologist. My doctorate is in pathology, but my actual work has always been virology. Crick’s body of work is unquestionably biochemistry and molecular biology. Wilkins is the same story, except that he was trained as a biophysicist, which is a very much more bio than phys.
I tell them “and you will find yourself back to what you are meant to learn in this class — looking at particles, fields, and potentials.”
Starting from particles, fields, and potentials, explain a methodology for determining the fidelity of a mononegavirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in the cell line HypLu/45.1 in comparison to the cell line A549.
A. Rsays
Azkyroth: I suspect he hasn’t had much of a hand in any real work, given that he is so far up his own arse.
antepreprosays
The site io9 interpreted it the same way as the rest of us: “Today’s XKCD Finally Takes Physics To Task”
Also skimmed through the XKCD forum post regarding this specific comic, and I don’t think I have seen the “Take that, Uptight Biologists” angle being forwarded.
I am sure uri4 must be right though. They seem too sure of themselves to possibly be wrong.
I’m a chemist by training and have worked in the area of drug design. Chemists work out how to produce the drugs (which is actually more complicated than it sounds), sometimes using biological techniques. Knowing what drugs to try and make is informed by biological testing and analysis. Much of the equipment used is based on the work of physicists. Even this description is a little too simplistic – where do you draw the line between being a chemist/biologist/physicist (e..g where does a biochemist, a physical chemist, a molecular biologist belong?)
Progress in science often occurs someone in one field makes use of something someone in another field has discovered, and these days it is the people who work on the “borders” of different fields who do some of the most exciting work.
I love working with people who understand different areas of science (and other fields as well) because no-one can be good at every field of science – and I like to stick with what I am good at. Those who think their area of expertise is better than others are missing out on the joy of working with others.
What a perfect comic, it should go up in the physics department as well.
One can’t help but wonder what the Chemistry person was planning to say, and whether they are currently desperately trying to figure out a different tack. (“Lessee… drugs? No, the bio people are really more responsible for that. Green revolution! …unsustainable long-term ecological disaster, particularly hitting the third world, mainly being mitigated by abandoning chemical fertilizers. Not a good idea. How about… plastic! Food additives? Leaded gasoline! Shutup shutup shutup. Maybe I can just chomp my cyanide pill and avoid the whole thing. Wait, this is just a Tic Tac — dammit!“)
Of course, the math people have been enabling all of the other science folk. No one gets blamed without mathematicians getting a share.
Wasn’t it Rutherford who came up with the stamp collecting jibe?
re @2:
The Chemistry person was undoubtedly thinking of “Alcohol the cure (and cause) of ALL man’s problems” /snark
@#4, Kevin Anthoney:
I think the quote is one of those things attributed to every possible source. Sort of along the lines of “you can judge a country by how they treat [fill in the blank]”, which IIRC has never been credibly proven to have been said by any of the people who are variously claimed to have said it (particularly Gandhi).
(The one about “young man, if I had wanted to learn the names of things, I would have been a botanist”, though, was apparently actually said to Leon Lederman by some particular particle physicist, I can’t remember which one offhand. Again IIRC, he mentions it in a footnote in The God Particle.)
Chemistry gave us the elements in vastly more detail than the philosophers did. And superior bicycle tires.
@#5, clithey tove (twas brillig (stevem)):
(One last comment before I go offline…)
Chemists can’t claim that one; farmers worked out alcohol on their own at least as long ago as ancient Mesopotamia — and they were equal opportunity employers for bartenders, too. (Now distilled liquor, that was chemists, or at least alchemists during the “let’s stop wasting time on trying to perform magic and start doing things which actually work” period when they were making the transition… of course, when distilled liquor showed up in Europe it was a scourge on society approximately equivalent to crack cocaine in America, people drank themselves into poverty, sold their children, and frequently drank themselves to death, so I’m not sure a chemist would actually want to claim it, but that was long ago, all the victims are past being able to complain, and at least it’s a legitimate achievement.)
I’m not sure where it comes from but I like:
If it moves, it’s biology
If it smells, it’s chemistry
If it doesn’t work, it’s physics
As a physicist, I love this comic :) very funny, with the benefit of being true
It is true that knowledge of biology was essential to the sharp reduction in deaths from infectious disease. But I have to point out that social science and policy were just as important. Knowledge about pathogens and the immune system wouldn’t have gotten us very far without implementation of public health measures. Sanitary sewers and water treatment plants also require civil engineering. It’s a team effort.
Also, the cartoon neglects the possibility of biologists doing evil, such as genetically engineering a virus. Or a Kraken, in a deep underground lair in Morris, Minnesota.
To be fair, that last one’s pretty unlikely, though. Who would do a thing like that?
Agreed with #10. I teach physics and am ever its enthusiastic promoter, but it’s a fair point.
Yeah, but bio populated an island with reincarnations of the dinosaurs make from frogs, not thinking about whether they should but only that they could. Those dinos then found a way to breed and ended up killing Newman. Game, set, match, bio! Physics rules!
I’ve been a science nerd since about 10, and still am. Yet as I’ve grown older I’ve come to believe that philosophy and art trump all.
One physicist, here, who has never subscribed to this (or any) disciplinary value hierarchy. If anything, I’ve got severe evolution envy (wish physics had such an amazing idea!). The stamp collecting gibe always struck me as appalling arrogance. I’ve often wished that I could have several lifetimes so I could also become a geologist, an astronomer, a …
re @8:
Vicar, [ooohhh: offline. even so…] I did not say chemists DEVELOPED alcohol, but surely Chemists will OWN it, for all it’s “chemical magic”. But then again, maybe I gave that Chemist too much credit. He could have just about to recite the famous motto: “Better living through CHEMISTRY”.
I get that it is not meant to be taken seriously (I hope), but:
Chemical weapons were used in WW1 with the result that they were not used in WW2 because even the villains of WW2 were too horrified. Biological weapons were used in modern times during WW2 by Japan. Both types of weapons are still researched (purely defensively, of course). Then there is the potential use in terrorism.
On the other hand: How many of the tools used in Biology/Medicine and Chemistry were only made possible by Physics? Of the top of my head: Crystallography, different types of microscope, X-rays/radiation, types of tomography (superconductivity), many different lasers.
On the third hand (oooh, spoooky): How many Physicists would have died as toddlers without the fruits of biological and chemical research?
There may be some unhealthy competition between these sciences and I think this is the point of the comic, not a take on physicists. It all boils down to quantum and relativity, anyway [1].
[1] Yes, I had to.
You need the whole thing. Physics are “the rules”. Can’t play the game without knowing the rules, or you’ll probably end up breaking something along the way. Chemistry, biology, astrophysics, and so on are how those rules work together to make new stuff. There’s knowing how a lever works, and there’s knowing how to build a car.
There’s this annoying trope in sci-fi stories where some fanciful author feels the need to make “love” a fundamental force of the universe. (It’s never “curiosity” or “empathy” I notice, always romantic love, because apparently artists don’t understand any other emotion than whatever random fling they just got over.) Interstellar is just the latest to do it.
I’d argue this. Being a “fundamental force” doesn’t make love more important. It makes it simplistic, basic. Isn’t it far more interesting for love to be something that the universe didn’t have so it had to be MADE? Love isn’t just some particle or wave, love is an emergent property like everything else about our minds that’s in any way interesting. Love is complicated, made up of so very many interactions of a living system, and it needs all that to keep going. Isn’t that a far more romantic concept?
QED. Q.E.D.
I recall reading somewhere that the “stamp collecting” quote, whoever said it, is misconstrued. The idea being that in science you’re either trying to figure out how and why things work, or you’re just naming and categorizing stuff. The word “physics” in this sense (possibly translated from German?) has a much broader meaning than as a specific academic discipline, and the quote wasn’t meant to disparage other disciplines.
But I can’t vouch for that interpretation. I’m curious if anyone else has heard it this way.
Area Man @21:
Most likely translated from Kiwi, as Rutherford was from NZ. As for interpretations, I favour “people sometimes say silly things”.
Wait, are we taking this seriously? Randall is clearly commenting on the insecuritiy and humorlessness of biologists.
But, if you want to play that way:
How many of the instruments used by biologists are attributable to the work of physicists?
How much of the analysis done by biologists can be traced back to methods developed for the analysis of problems in the physics of inanimate systems?
And, not for nothing, putting comics on your office door always struck me as the equivalent to playing a comedy album at a party. Just saying.
Dark Jaguar @19:
Every science has its ‘rules’. This sort of thinking is a disservice to chemistry, biology, etc.
The moment I saw this comic, I knew I’d see it on Pharyngula later.
uri4 #23
clearly?
But it’s unclear if he was the originator of the quote. As near as I can tell, it was first attributed to him decades after his death, and there are unsourced variants that mean different things.
At any rate, “people sometimes say silly things” is as good an interpretation as any.
Just you wait. Biology will have its Apocalypse moment, soon enough.
The Vicar #2
I recommend The Poisonser’s Handbook. A century ago, murder by poison was common and often impossible to prove. That is no longer true. You might argue that it was medical doctors and biologists who achieved this, but the chemists had to understand the chemical nature of the poisons before the medical people could do their work.
It’s going on my office door too…
and I’m a physicist.
How I have hated that stupid stamp-collecting quote. Happily, our current majors have never seen or heard of it; that poster seems to have disappeared, thank goodness.
Wow, speaking of humorlessness, #23…
How much of the knowledge used by physicists can be traced back to random people randomly cobbling facts and ideas together until it sort of worked? Checkmate, Physicists!
More seriously, can we please stop the pointless attachment of supposed breakthroughs* to a certain discipline? Every time I hear it it strikes me as exceedingly childish, not to mention short-sighted. Especially when acutal scientists do it, who really should know better.**
If you want to get all smug and swell your heads:
– The physicists provided the basic knowledge
– The biologists figured out the problem
– The chemists made the solution
– The engineers figured out how to make enough for everybody
There. And it works for both medicine and weapons of mass destruction, so it’s fair all around.
*Rarely a discrete event but rather years of research seen as a breakthrough at the moment somone finally got a working model.
**Not intended a criticism of todays XKCD, which, being a webcomic, is lovely.
#32, komarov
The problem is compounded by the fact that you don’t have to go back very far before you start finding ‘omnidisciplinary scientists’… many of history’s ‘great physicists’ were also ‘great chemists’ and ‘great engineers’ and so on and so forth. What sort of a scientist was Robert Hooke, for example?
Uri4 @ 23:
I sense that parties aren’t quite your milieu, what with having no sense of humour.
The Vicar (#6):
It was Enrico Fermi who told Lederman, “Young man, if I could remember the names of these particles, I would have been a botanist.”
One could do alot of analyses of comics taped to university professors’ office doors.
Won’t someone think of the InternetPsychologists?
So, starting from quantum chromodynamics and electroweak theory, show that a zebra wants to eat grass. You may also reference general relativity should gravity become relevant to the solution.
A momentary lapse… @37:
Well, there are penguin diagrams. I think zebras require a non-perturbative approach, since they’re kind of nervous.
#37, A momentary lapse…
That seems a bit uncharitable; the fact that we do not have a complete chain of coherent, connected theories joining Feynman diagrams with savannah ecosystems doesn’t mean that such a chain could not exist. Perhaps you’d like you suggest at what point biology is cleanly and unambiguously separated from physics? Anyway, there’s (inevitably) another XKCD which seems germane… https://xkcd.com/435/
The silliness is to be found in the “Can’t play the game without knowing the rules”. Modern physics is modern. Science is thousands of years old.
#32, komarov
Komorov, I’m sure it’s around here somewhere, maybe in your pocket. No, your OTHER pocket.
Let me help find it, I’ll look over here, while you look over there.
<high pitched> “here, here. Come here little sense of humor, I got a cookie here, waiting for you…”
I think a “Degree Off” would include a pretty hefty helping of humanities scholars, unless this is some kind of divisional playoff for the hard scientists.
@#17, slithey tove (twas brillig (stevem))
(Apologies for misspelling your handle above; it was a typo.)
If chemists are permitted to claim undistilled alcohol as their own because “we didn’t create it or discover it but it’s in our field”, then by the same logic the biologists can claim all life as their own, including all of humanity, and the physicists can claim the entire universe.
@#29: moarscienceplz
I have The Poisoner’s Handbook and have read it twice. (Great book and highly recommended, but it really needed more proofreading than it got before publication.) I’d say that neither field could claim all of those forensic tests all by itself. Some of them are closer to chemistry than others, but practically all of them (possibly excluding arsenic) involve some definite biological work as well — remember how often the book mentioned animal testing?
(If you want an interesting book on distilled alcohol, by the way, try The Much-Lamented Death of Madame Geneva. It’s really about the English struggles with the stuff, specifically, but it’s very interesting and the parallels to the modern War On Drugs are astonishing; the author generally doesn’t try to dot so large an “i”, but the facts are so blatant that they don’t have to. It ends with some modern stuff — primarily the American Prohibition period, IIRC — so it may eventually dip into that. It’s been a while since I read it.)
@7
Yes, philosophers versus chemists brings up Yet Another Favorite XKCD cartoon: Polonium-bending
@blgmtns #18
Sorry to double post you on this point — I had some urgent physics biz to deal with between composing and posting and inadvertently asked a question you’d already answered.
@PZ #31, @ Caine #34 — imagine smilies inserted where needed. (I will try not to check back to learn into what part of a physicist you’d insert a smilie)
I like to think that the next panel has the biologist and the physicist piling onto the chemist
In what regard do biologists typically hold chemists? My tribe (a particular kind of solid state physics) tend to be contemptuous of … well … everyone who isn’t of the body. But we hold a special chemists in special disesteem. We also (speaking for my age cohort and specialization) frequently imagine that we could be biologists. At AVS meetings, whenever a biologist drops in to present, we gather in front of the poster and say “biology seems fun, bet we could do that”
@14 Larry:
Jurassic Park, really?
What about Gojira? Mutated biology ripping its way through Tokyo — Biology for the win — Life finds a way.
Biological weapons were used in modern times during WW2 by Japan.
Use of anthrax as a biological weapon was considered by Britain during WW2 but they never actually used it. The person who came up with the plan to bomb Germany with anthrax was knighted, though, so I don’t think it was moral horror that kept them from preceding.
Duh. Proceeding. Can’t brain today.
Deployment was the issue with bioweapons in WWII. The Japanese solved it for plague with the flea bomb, but anthrx was a slightly harder nut to crack.
Oh, and uri4 @44, I really, really doubt you could just “do biology”. In fact, you are a perfect example of what this webcomic is trying to demonstrate. I’m a virologist specializing in the molecular biology of a relatively small group of viruses. I am capable of doing productive work on a fairly large number of RNA viruses, but my focus is on only a few. However, if you put a DNA virus in front of me, I would be as lost as a new grad student for the first month or so while I learned the biology of that particular virus. Ask me to do hardcore bacteriology, and I would be entirely useless. The point being that biology is such a complex field that even people within the same specialty (microbiology) are not able to just “do” the work of another sub-specialty within that specialty. I doubt any sort of physicist would be capable of designing the sort of experiment needed to examine the role of the siRNA response in viral polymerase fidelity.
In the vein of how fights with siblings are much more vicious than fights with friends, put an organismal biologist and a molecular biologist in a room together and see how many janitors it takes to clean up the blood later.
@A.R.
I know you are, but what am I?
Seriously, the physicist in the comic is playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture — when the biologist fires up a powerpoint presentation and tries to win the debate by quantifying the good her discipline has done in the world.
The gag is NOT that physicists are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Or maybe you are going double-secret-meta-ironic; winding us up by posting in the character of a drearily stolid and literal “biologist”. I which case, touché.
So what you’re saying is, a solution exists?
Yeah, actually, knowing the history of XKCD, it is.
And personal lubricants. :D :D :D
If I ever run a fantasy tabletop game, I’m going to have someone open a gate to the Elemental Plane of Hydrogen.
Also, from
The self-awareness is weak in this one.
Right. Exactly.
Huh? What… didn’t you just say…? Let me go back and read it again…
Um….? Okay. So I guess you are so entrenched in being a arrogant dismissive asshole, that when you are an arrogant dismissive asshole, and someone makes a joke portraying you as an arrogant dismissive asshole, your are so caught up in being an arrogant dismissive asshole that you don’t even realize that someone is calling you an arrogant dismissive asshole.
Let’s go over this again:
Yes. Playing the dozens, doing the standard material from a freshman physics lecture is BEING AN ARROGANT DISMISSIVE ASSHOLE!!
Right. Because her field actually did something useful this century while physicists just like to dismiss her as “stamp collecting”. She *IS* the good guy in this strip and she *DID* win on legitimate grounds. The physicist is simply a jerk.
The gag is that undergraduates with a major in physics are arrogant and dismissive of other disciplines.
Right, uri4?
Far be it from me to correct the mighty Physicist, Uri, as a mere Humanities, but yeah, no, you are super, super wrong.
Let’s examine basic joke structure, shall we? Set up, Punchline. Everything else is window dressing. Let us set aside the WORDSWORDSWORDS and get to the key sentences then:
“All science is either physics or stamp collecting” is the set up.
the punchline is “I thought this was supposed to be fun” “no (fun) is stamp collecting.”
He’s being accused of being a dilettante for not regarding science with an appropriate gravitas and thinking of it as a source of quaint anecdotes rather than the shit with which we change the world.
But if you did biology, or comedy you would know that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. You understand it better but it dies in the process. EB White said it, who was, admittedly, also not a physicist.
One more thing uri4, if you knew anything about xkcd, you would know to read the mouseover text. How do I know you didn’t? Because if you had read it, you wouldn’t be making the bombastic and unbelievably stupid arguments you’ve been vomiting at us.
Well… let’s not forget that “We have slain one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse while you’ve created a new one” is a pretty nifty zinger in itself. And the “you must be thinking of stamp collecting” is pretty dang funny. She isn’t humorless.
A question from a non-of-the-above: Has there ever been a physicist (or chemist, etc) who was not a biological artifact?
Oh right — this is the internet.
@woozy
You win.
A. R #57
That might be the problem.
But the mouseover doesn’t work on mobile devices.
However, xkcd has a mirrored site for mobile things.
That comic is here
http://m.xkcd.com/1520/
you need to tap (alt-text)
Xkcd’s frequent lampooning of physicists may have something to do with the fact that the guy who draws xkcd – Randall Munroe – is a former roboticist. He’s predominately an engineer.
Or someone could just paste the mouse-over text: “I’M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE ‘SQUISHY SCIENCES’, I ASSUMED YOU’D BE A LITTLE HARDER.”
He has a physics degree. He jokes about physicists’ supposed arrogance a LOT. I think it’s self-deprecation/recognition but also a form of apology/contrition. I think.
But seriously, to see this comic and to assume that it’s the biologist that is the butt of the joke is just plain delusional.
#53, Azkyroth, B*Cos[F(u)]==Y
Order of the Stick brings us osmium, silicon, titanium and chlorine elementals.
#55, chigau
I don’t think it is just undergrads. The “everything is just physics and the rest of you are doing it wrong” thing also appears in grown-up physicists, too. See also, http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2556
@#64, anym:
Ha. Six years before the first of those, the old webcomic Adventurers! (JRPG parody, particularly Final Fantasy) had the characters tasked with obtaining “the elemental relics”, which periodically got referenced as the characters advanced through the quest until they finally got them all. (Which, in true JRPG style, really didn’t have much to do with elements in any way. But it looked impressive.) (Then again, the Adventurers! universe always did have something of a problem with the whole idea of science…)
You can’t, i guarantee. Not without studying the subject as anybody else. Being a qualified physicist is not transferable to being a qualified biologist, period. The fact that you seem to think otherwise just shows that a) you don’t know biology for sure and b) you are a smarmy, self-important, delusional arsehole. Keep imagining that you can do biology and while you are at it, imagine that you are a real boy.
As a (sort of) chemist&biologist, i would not give up on green revolution so easily. The blame for why green revolution is not sustainable in long-term lies clearly at the feet of physicists, who failed to deliver renewable and cheap source of energy on time.
Of course all of the three fields above would not be able to discern measurement from background noise for fine things without the swiss knife of sciences – statistics.
@67 Charly
Aye, clearly mathmaticians are the giants on whos shoulders scientists stand ;-) With the development of computers, they’ve finally gotten something in return.
@#67, Charly
Only if you were planning on growing everything hydroponically. Chemical fertilizers don’t merely face a problem of being unsustainable to manufacture in the long term, they actually end up destroying the microbiomes of soil by changing the chemistry of it, leaving it impoverished and drier in the long-term and vulnerable to minor problems which soils without chemical fertilizer would have been able to shrug off — possibly, in the long-enough (centuries) term, causing the soil to become completely unusable for crops, although this is obviously unproven, and desertification from climate change is more likely to cause the same effects before this becomes a serious issue. (Of course, climate change is also largely thanks to chemists, loosely speaking…) :P
Now, if any of you chemist/biologists figures out how to turn normal soil into Amazon-style black soil, then you’ll have worked out a major trick and deserve some applause. (And yes, I’m aware that this is being worked on.) Unfortunately, most biologists seem to want to go into GMOs, even though most GMOs which reach the market actually require more resources to grow than non-GM equivalents, thus making them accelerate climate change while being more vulnerable to it. (This is why, when people like PZ talk about how the anti-GMO crowd are so “anti-science”, I want to yell and throw things. GM crops are theoretically a way of dealing with climate change in the same sense that nuclear energy is a theoretically a way of dealing with pollution — it hasn’t worked yet, ever, even once, but the people who are in favor of it are never discouraged by the ever-increasing list of failures.)
I can think of only one response to this smug biologist:
<shudder>
human centipede
</shudder>
and it can’t be unthought.
On the other hand, they’ve probably all spontaneously burst into flames at your suggestion that tangible results ought to matter to them. D:
Dafuq? I could have sworn rainforest soil was notably poor-quality because all the nutrients were in the plants *reads*
The problem is that the “anti-GMO crowd” aren’t arguing that
They’re flailing and screaming about how OH MAH GAWERD IT R NAWT TEH NACHURALS IT R EAT MAH BABBY!!!!!!!!!!!!111111111111111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!11!!!!!!! FRANKENFOOOOOOOOOODDDDD D: D: D: D: D: D: D:
And yes, those fuckheads are anti-science. And worse, they’re doing active harm to the ability of rational concerns about GMOs-as-practiced to be voiced, heard, and addressed.
Azkyroth @71:
Terra preta.
Oh, I didn’t see that The Vicar had already linked to that.
@azhael #66
Why do I have to imagine that I am any kind of boy at all?
Since the irony filters seem to be set on “self-immolate”, I will write plainly:
As a long time reader of the comic, it seemed unlikely to me that Randall was saying something as trite as “physicists think biologists are dummies”. For me, the joke in the strip turns on the absurdly overblown response of the biologist to Cueball’s hackneyed “physics rules” routine. (And no, the alt text does not seem to me to be Randall stepping forward and saying “take that, thou arrogant arse!”. Rather it seems a further amplification of the already disproportionate response of the Bun-haired Woman)
For working scientists, the idea of abrupt and impenetrable boundaries between named disciplines (biology stops where physics begins, for instance) seems silly. In fact, it is falsified by a glance at the publications in almost any physics journal. Spectroscopists, microscopists crystallographers, (for instance) who trained as a physicists or chemists do work on problems in biology. When biologists have presented at the AVS, ECS, or ACS meetings I’ve attended, their work has been accessible and meaningful to me because they used tools and techniques that I understood. (An aside: as a grad student I had opportunities to work on projects with biologists, but was waved off by my adviser who — for reasons of his own — was eager to have a materials scientist on my committee)
As for the value of such cross-discipline efforts; Rosalind Franklin was a physical chemist, Francis Crick was a physicist., Maurice WIlkins was a physicist…
I do not know the circumstance under which Lord Rutherford made the remark about “stamp collecting”, but when I repeat it to my 200-level students (who do not usually include life science majors) I am explaining the reductive and material foundation of physics. It is a provocation, to be sure, but not an insult. “Ask enough ‘why’ or ‘how’ questions in ANY science,” I tell them “and you will find yourself back to what you are meant to learn in this class — looking at particles, fields, and potentials.”
Uri, you’re a fucking idiot.
And between the absurd lengths of willful blindness and motivated circular reasoning you’ve demonstrated here, and the blinders that come with smugness at your level, I wouldn’t trust a single result that you had any hand in.
Really? If you really are a long time reader, you would have seen all of the other jabs taken at arrogant physicists.
Yes, Franklin was a p-chemist. So what? P-chem is an interdisciplinary field like biochem, and like biochem, depending on the individual lab, the work can be very chem, or very physics. As for Crick, he was just as much a physicist as I ma a pathologist. My doctorate is in pathology, but my actual work has always been virology. Crick’s body of work is unquestionably biochemistry and molecular biology. Wilkins is the same story, except that he was trained as a biophysicist, which is a very much more bio than phys.
Starting from particles, fields, and potentials, explain a methodology for determining the fidelity of a mononegavirus RNA-dependent RNA polymerase in the cell line HypLu/45.1 in comparison to the cell line A549.
Azkyroth: I suspect he hasn’t had much of a hand in any real work, given that he is so far up his own arse.
The site io9 interpreted it the same way as the rest of us: “Today’s XKCD Finally Takes Physics To Task”
Also skimmed through the XKCD forum post regarding this specific comic, and I don’t think I have seen the “Take that, Uptight Biologists” angle being forwarded.
I am sure uri4 must be right though. They seem too sure of themselves to possibly be wrong.
(Also, this comic: https://xkcd.com/793/
And for a take on biologists, this one: https://xkcd.com/520/ )
I’m a chemist by training and have worked in the area of drug design. Chemists work out how to produce the drugs (which is actually more complicated than it sounds), sometimes using biological techniques. Knowing what drugs to try and make is informed by biological testing and analysis. Much of the equipment used is based on the work of physicists. Even this description is a little too simplistic – where do you draw the line between being a chemist/biologist/physicist (e..g where does a biochemist, a physical chemist, a molecular biologist belong?)
Progress in science often occurs someone in one field makes use of something someone in another field has discovered, and these days it is the people who work on the “borders” of different fields who do some of the most exciting work.
I love working with people who understand different areas of science (and other fields as well) because no-one can be good at every field of science – and I like to stick with what I am good at. Those who think their area of expertise is better than others are missing out on the joy of working with others.