mostlyscrutable:

goldenorbrokenorlost:

mselise:

jollywell:

evaporites:

johnskylar:

lannamichaels:

I’M SORRY, FROM YOUR YEARS OF CONDESCENDING TOWARD THE ‘SQUISHY SCIENCES’, I ASSUMED YOU’D BE A LITTLE HARDER.

Having had to spend all of college listening to physics majors at Caltech talk about stamp collecting while I was trying to teach them biology, fucking thank you, Randall Munroe.

If I don’t reblog this seriously consider that I am
Locked in a basement somewhere and in need of rescuing.

😂😂😂

In defense of Feynman, he never said that. If anyone did say it, it was fucking Rutherford apparently. 

Rutherford – totally the kind of ass who’d say that and would hand-wave saving billions of lives (counting future lives saved) as stamp collecting.

Feynman – liked not dying from infectious diseases, also liked playing bongos.

Feynman: also a sexist fuckneck, but hey I guess he wrote funny stories

Speaking as a physicist, I have nothing but respect for other fields of science. I know my colleagues will sometimes mock them, but I take that as a sign that they’ve never bothered to actually learn anything about those fields.  Other scientists are doing amazing things.

One of my favorite things is boosting the egos of social scientists.  From their reactions when we meet, I get the feeling that most of them have this mental image of physics as some bastion of mathematical difficulty and rigor.  Any math they’re doing must pale before the complexity of physics.

Let me shatter that illusion for you.  I can’t speak for really high-end theory, but as an experiment physicist, the most complicated statistics I use is mean and standard deviations.  That’s pretty much it.  And from what I’ve seen, that’s common.  I was considered the statistics expert in my research group because I could 1) program a least-squares fit and 2) actually knew how to correct standard deviation for small sample sizes. 

So any social scientist is miles above me, a physicist, in statistics skills.  This is because physics experiments are easy.  If I have a confounding variable, I redo the experiment and take it out.  I don’t have to worry about my samples lying to me, I don’t have to worry about working with data sets I can’t retake or underlying factors I can’t measure.  It amazes me how social scientists can take these messy complicated datasets, ones I would have no idea how to approach, and somehow extract useful information from them.

Which isn’t to downplay other fields of science either.  I’ve just met more social scientists.  But in general, if I can’t think of something amazing about another field of science, that just means I haven’t learned enough about it.