{"id":2434,"date":"2008-03-29T07:15:55","date_gmt":"2008-03-29T07:15:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/29\/strings-and-philately\/"},"modified":"2008-03-29T07:15:55","modified_gmt":"2008-03-29T07:15:55","slug":"strings-and-philately","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/29\/strings-and-philately\/","title":{"rendered":"Strings and Philately"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Evolving Thoughts, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/evolvingthoughts\/2008\/03\/physicists_undertake_stampcoll.php\">John Wilkins pokes string theorists<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Ernest_Rutherford\">Ernst Rutherford<\/a>, the &#8220;father&#8221; of nuclear physics, once airily declared &#8220;In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting&#8221;. By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were just sampling contingent examples of physics.<\/p>\n<p>So it is with some amusement that I note that in order to make sense of string theory, a group of physicists have been <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nature.com\/news\/2008\/080326\/full\/452392b.html\">trying to do taxonomy<\/a> over string theories. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;m never sure who reads what blogs, but I wouldn&#8217;t want this to fail to come to the attention of the right people&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>(There&#8217;s much more to the post than that&#8211; the shot at string theory is just the jumping-off point for a discussion of philosophy of science. I doubt he realizes what a can of worms he&#8217;s (potentially) opening with that, though&#8230;)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Over at Evolving Thoughts, John Wilkins pokes string theorists: Ernst Rutherford, the &#8220;father&#8221; of nuclear physics, once airily declared &#8220;In science there is only physics. All the rest is stamp collecting&#8221;. By this he meant that the theory of physics is the only significant thing in science. Such mundane activities as taxonomy in biology were&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2008\/03\/29\/strings-and-philately\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Strings and Philately<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7,11,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-science","category-string_theory","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2434"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2434\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2434"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2434"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2434"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}