Nice writeup of the scene. The physicists part reminds me of
“Physicists, it turns out, are almost perfectly suited to invading other people’s disciplines, being not only extremely clever but also generally much less fussy than most about the problems they choose to study. Physicists tend to see themselves as the lords of the academic jungle, loftily regarding their own methods as above the ken of anybody else and jealously guarding their own terrain. But their alter egos are closer to scavengers, happy to borrow ideas and technologies from anywhere if they seem like they might be useful, and delighted to stomp all over someone else’s problem. As irritating as this attitude can be to everybody else, the arrival of the physicists into a previously non-physics area of research often presages a period of great discovery and excitement. Mathematicians do the same thing occasionally, but no one descends with such fury and in so great a number as a pack of hungry physicists, adrenalized by the scent of a new problem.”
Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, 2003, Duncan J. Watts; pp. 61-62
Nice writeup of the scene. The physicists part reminds me of
“Physicists, it turns out, are almost perfectly suited to invading other people’s disciplines, being not only extremely clever but also generally much less fussy than most about the problems they choose to study. Physicists tend to see themselves as the lords of the academic jungle, loftily regarding their own methods as above the ken of anybody else and jealously guarding their own terrain. But their alter egos are closer to scavengers, happy to borrow ideas and technologies from anywhere if they seem like they might be useful, and delighted to stomp all over someone else’s problem. As irritating as this attitude can be to everybody else, the arrival of the physicists into a previously non-physics area of research often presages a period of great discovery and excitement. Mathematicians do the same thing occasionally, but no one descends with such fury and in so great a number as a pack of hungry physicists, adrenalized by the scent of a new problem.”
Six Degrees: The Science Of A Connected Age, 2003, Duncan J. Watts; pp. 61-62