Dave at the World’s Fair is trying to start a “meme” based on a Science Creative Quarterly piece about physics envy among biologists and vice versa. He’s asking other science bloggers whether there’s another field that they wish they were working in.
While I have occasionally joked that if I had it to do over, I would become a biologist studying coral reefs, so I could justify spending my sabbaticals snorkeling in the tropics, I’m really very happy doing what I do (at least when things work). I enjoy experimental work, I like the fact that my lab is fairly self-contained, and I think AMO physics is a great area to be in because it offers connections to a huge range of phenomena, and clean, clear results. I’m jealous of the funding levels for some other fields, but I’m not envious of anybody else’s science.
I’m particularly not envious of biology, in which every result seems to be messy and contingent. Everything has a hundred confounding factors, and all the results seem to be statistical. Clean and unambiguous results are rare, and that would drive me absolutely crazy. They’re one small step removed from social science.
There is one thing I envy about biology, though, and that’s their reputation as the friendly, approachable science. Which, as far as I’m concerned, is mostly undeserved.
One of the maddening things about teaching first-year students is how many of them come into physics classes already convinced that physics is difficult and arcane and they’re not going to be able to handle it. This is before taking a single physics class in college, mind.
But half of these students will cheerfully announce that they intend to be pre-meds. Physics is scary, but biology is cuddly and approachable.
And yet, some of the absolute worst talks I have ever heard have come from biologists– loaded with jargon, devoid of motivation, without the slightest attempt to connect with an audience beyond their immediate field. Synthetic chemistry is worse, but it takes some doing to beat out molecular biology talks in the area of incomprehensible gibberish. A lot of the bio blogging here and elsewhere is the same way– it’s no more comprehensible to the laity than Jacque Distler’s TeX-enabled string theory blogging.
And yet, students flock to it, which I find baffling on some level. I think the difference is that physics is known to be highly mathematical, and Math is Hard. In biology, on the other hand, the difficult bits are all about vocabulary, and anybody can learn jargon. It’s a lot easier to learn to throw around big words and make people think that you know what you’re talking about than it is to learn to manipulate equations.
So, if there’s anything I envy in another science, it’s the way entering students see biology as something approachable and within their ability to understand. I think we lose a lot of good students from physics because they show up to the first day of class convinced that they’re going to struggle, and at the first sign of difficulty they just throw up their hands, and run for the life sciences. If they came in with a better attitude, they’d have a better experience, and I wouldn’t have to listen to people tell me about how much they hated physics all the goddamn time.