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Captain Hammer Physicists

A day after posting about the innumeracy of intellectuals, Chad Orzel asks about the reverse perspective — does the arrogance flow both ways?

This immediately reminded me of a couple years back, when D^2 and the rest of the Crooked Timber crowd got rather annoyed with physicists. Apparently, bored physicists have a habit of diving other fields with shiny new mathematical models — nothing wrong with that, cross-pollination is great — but the kicker is that they tend to do this without first bothering to read any of the previous research in that area.

This tends to A) irritate the hell out of existing scholars in the field and B) generate papers that at best reinvent the wheel, at worst end up being Not Even Wrong. See:

• Isolated social networkers
• Physicists in action, latest in an occasional series

I'm not sure whether this disease is confined just to physicists, or whether the other hard scientists play this game too. Given my brief experience in the discipline, I suspect it's the former. In any case, I hereby dub this mentality the "Captain Hammer" approach to cross-discipline research:

Stand back everyone
nothing here to see!
A brand new field of research
in the middle of it — me!
Yes, Captain Hammer's here
hair blowing in the breeze
This data needs my modeling expertise...

"When... you're the best / you can't rest, there's no use / There's ass... needs kickin' / some ticking bomb to defuse" ... you get the idea.

Posted by Evan Goer on Jul. 27, 2008 at 9:30 AM | Comments (0)

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