I’m going to be busy all day (more or less) at the Steinmetz Symposium, listening to talks about the fantastic things our students have been doing with their research projects. So it’s going to be a “talk among yourselves” day here at Uncertain Principles, for the most part.
It’s been a little while since I ran a Dorky Poll thread, mostly because I’m running low on topics. Here’s one that may be a little too esoteric, inspired by looking at the diploma on my wall:
Chemical Physics, or Physical Chemistry?
For bonus points, what’s the difference between them?
Also, are there other pairs of liminal sciences where the name ordering makes a difference?
(If you didn’t know it already, my Ph.D. is from the Chemical Physics Program at the University of Maryland, College Park, mostly because they had this cool program where you were encouraged to work at NIST. The practical effect of this was mostly that I didn’t need to take either Classical Mechanics or E&M for the quals (I took E&M out of Jackson later, which was definitely a better experience), instead taking a couple of courses in the Chemistry department (Thermodynamics and “Quantum Chemistry” which was basically “Molecular Spectroscopy”).
(To the extent that they are separable fields, I would say that chemical physics involves the study of smallish molecules by building them up from atomic physics type models, while physical chemistry involves the study of somewhat larger molecules by probing the physics of what holds them together. If you know and care what “hyperfine structure” is, you’re more likely to be a chemical physicist than a physical chemist.
(But I’m just guessing, really…)
Maybe not quite in the same territory, but it took me a long time to get my head around the distinction between Molecular Biology and Biochemistry.
being in the same boat on chemical physics / physical chemistry, I mostly just go by whether I’m aiming the next paper at JChemPhys or JPhysChem(a,b,c…) . That, or the day of the week, phase of the moon, whether I’m sitting with my back to the door in a game of dragon poker, etc. My boss claims that which one you take depends on which dep’t you’re sitting in, and which courses you have to teach, but considering he’s straddling 4 different dep’t’s on any given day, I’ll just take his word for it…
oops, forgot to add, a really interesting question in the same vein, especially for those of us pondering where the money’s going to likely be available in the next few decades, is where does Biophysics / Biochemistry fit?
Physical Economics and Econophysics.
Computer Science and Scientific Computing.
Quantum Computing and Computational Quantum Mechanics.
Though Feynman, as grandfather of Quantum Computing, thought that its greatest utility would be in Computational Quantum Mechanics.
The way I always heard it explained was that if your degree is in chemistry, you call what you do “physical chemistry”, but if your degree is in physics, you call it “chemical physics”.
Astrobiology vs Bioastronomy
That is a long unwritten post over at my place
University of Illinois offers programs in Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Mechanics.
The difference is whether they know physics. Or chemistry.
In the broader sense, of course. A PhD physical chemist lives next door to me, and I have to be careful to define some typical physics issues that might come up in a discussion of what went on in class today. Some he knows, but many he doesn’t.
The difference between Computer Science and Scientific Computing is quite simple: whether you write computer programs on a regular basis.
There’s a slight difference in attitude between “biochemistry” and “chemical biology”. Biochemists generally approach problems by looking at proteins, purifying them, and seeing how they work (via mass spec, in vitro assays, etc.). Chemical biologists try to examine how systems work by using small molecules to perturb the systems. Both mostly study proteins, so there’s a lot of overlap, but one can think of “biochemistry” as old-timey protein purification, gradients, etc. and “chemical biology” as “new school”, genomics-y.
In the early days a molecular biologist was said to be a biochemist who was practicing without a license.
As for physical chemistry and chemical physics: to the physical chemist H is the symbol for a hydrogen atom; to the chemical physicist H is the Hamiltonian operator.
Well.
Started off as a chemist. By sophomore year was taking advanced math, then advanced physics in junior year (skipped intro physics), but B.S. in Chemistry. Grad School for “theoretical chemistry”, says the degree, at a top ten Chemistry department. Actual work was molecular physics. I don’t care about hyperfine splitting — too much — and neither should you. Post doc in computational quantum optics. Now unemployable as physicist or chemist.
I’d say I’m a: “useful physicist”
I asked that question of Herb Gutowski at a grad student mixer in 1970. He said that if the person had to be led in from the rain before they drowned in gap mouthed amazement they were a Chemical Physicist but if the person had the sense to get in out of the rain on their own they were a Physical Chemist.
Another discriminant used to be asking an individual if they knew what the Wigner Eckart theorem was. Physical chemists profess ignorance while chemical physicists become decidedly uncomfortable and perspire profusely.
Simple Country Physicist, you left me howling with that last one. Yeah, that would do it! In fact, that question would go right to the top of ones that students don’t want to hear at a defense or oral examination.
Professor: “No, a reduced matrix element is not on a Slimfast diet. Would like to try again?”
Mathematical Physics and Physical Mathematics.
Regarding the latter, see:
Introduction to physical mathematics, by P. G. Harper and D. L. Weaire. Pp 260. ?8-95 (paperback) ISBN 0-521-26908-3, ?20 (hardback) ISBN 0-521-26278-X
MIT runs The Physical Mathematics Seminar, organized by Martin Bazant, John Bush and Eric Lauga, is devoted to the mathematical modeling of real scientific experiments and engineering systems.
The University of Minnesota explained a graduate course in 2003 as follows.
Interaction of Mathematics and Physics has been very fruitful for both subjects from very early on. While in the ages from Newton and Leibniz to Euler, to Lagrange and Laplace, the two fields were practically indistinguishable, further development brought not only incredible depth, but also contributed to certain divergence of interests, methods, and motivations. The situation in the 20th century was marked by periodically discovering that methods developed solely for the sake of one field could also be used to make unexpected breakthroughs in the other. In the late 20th century, when string theory came about and the theoretical physicists proved to be at times more abstract than the fellow mathematicians, the history of science got an unusual shift: the vague ideas of physics found their place within the rigor of mathematics and produced new methods, fields, and of course, remarkable theorems.Examples include statistical and quantum mechanical methods in knot theory, gauge theory methods in low-dimensional topology, instanton ideas throughout geometry, Feynman integral and diagram techniques in algebra and combinatorics, the inverse scattering problem and quantum group theory, mirror symmetry and enumerative algebraic geometry, to name a few. Perhaps, these exciting developments created a field that may be called Physical Mathematics: Mathematics no longer plays a service role; it is rather Physics which is being applied to Mathematics.
Physical methods thereby became indispensable in training the modern mathematician, and one of the main goals of the graduate course Math 8390 “Topics in Mathematical Physics” developed in the Fall of 2001 was to introduce the graduate students to the world of Physical Mathematics. The course was designed as a one-semester topics course for advanced graduate students, and was in fact attended not only by students, but also by several faculty members.
The course is centered around recent applications of ideas from quantum field theory to pure, “mainstream” mathematics, presented in a form accessible to graduate students. Topics include operad theory, moduli spaces, homotopy algebra, algebraic structures in string theory, deformation quantization, and graph homology.
Prof. Tim Poston emails to add:
Algebraic Topology â Topological Algebra.
Genetic algorithms â Algorithmic genetics.
Ontogeny of theology â Theology of ontogeny.
Mathematical Biology â Biological Mathematics.
I’m currently getting a degree (B.S.) in Chemical Physics. To echo a previous comment, I’ll call it “Physical Chemistry” or “Chemical Physics” depends on entirely which department I’m feeling more attached to at the moment–which generally corresponds to who’s providing me with free food at the moment. The Physics department is fairly reliable for wine and cheese, whereas the Chemistry department mostly offers sweets (which give me headaches) but it sometimes known for providing good beer in copious quantities.