[Todos] Physics and Mathematics

[fabio vicentini]

If you can't dazzle them with your brilliance, baffle them with your
bullshit.
You’re Either a Theoritician or a Experimentalist

by Jonathan Gardner <http://fwcon.wordpress.com/author/gettingitright/>

In the Physics community, Physicists join one of two groups and rarely
associate outside of their group except to hurl invectives and point out
the stupidity of the other group.

On one side are the *theoriticians*. These are people who, like Einstein,
postulate and pontificate on the meaning of the observed data, and propose
new theories to explain life, the universe, and everything. Of note, the
Nobel Prize in Physics is never awarded to a theoretician, because the
Nobel committee believes theoreticians are a waste of precious oxygen.

On the other side are the *experimentalists*, who get their hands dirty
inventing new ways to torture nature to yield up her secrets. The most
famous experimentalist is Ernest Rutherford, the father of modern
experimentalism. He showed how you can take a team of physicists and
rapidly assemble experiments with reproducible results, all the while
improvising and tweaking what you have already got.

Theoreticians make terrible experimentalists, and vice-versa.

In Physics, it would be *unthinkable* to have a theoretician and an
experimentalist be the same person. If a physicist came up with a theory
and simultaneously created the experiment to prove it, you can bet that
physicists across the world would take that with a very large grain of
salt. Of course, good physicists take every claim skeptically, and are very
good at criticizing other’s experimental methods, but those where the same
person would get professional credit for both the theory and the experiment
are especially dubious.

NOTA: Esta comunicacion esta dirigida al dpto de fisica. No tiene sentido
enviarla al dpto de matematica donde son todos pajeros académicos.
------------ próxima parte ------------
Se ha borrado un adjunto en formato HTML...
URL: http://mail.df.uba.ar/pipermail/todos/attachments/20131004/c1951d8b/attachment.html