Some physicists in this list should seriously ponder on this article,
"The humble physicist".
It hardly raises an eyebrow when someone proclaims that physicists are
an arrogant lot. The topic recurs periodically at the Physics Today
lunch table and even was the subject of a February 2003 Opinion piece
that J. Murray Gibson wrote for the magazine. Gibson took the
arrogance of physicists as a given and often helpful quality, but he
argued that it had its negative consequences as well.
I think I see where the notion of the arrogant physicist comes from.
First of all, some high-profile physicists are undeniably arrogant.
Physicists take pride in their work and think it is important. Perhaps
most significantly, physicists tend to think that their scientific
worldview, with its ideals of objectivity and empiricism, is superior
to the alternatives.
But aren’t those all human qualities, not doled out in special measure
to physicists? Any subgroup you can name has its share of arrogant
jerks. Pretty much all academics take pride in their work and think
it’s important. So does the guy down the hall in advertising, and, I
expect, so too do my lawyer, barber, and most other workers. And isn’t
it almost axiomatic that once you’ve found a worldview that works for
you, you’ll find it superior to the ones you’ve rejected?
When you put a bunch of physicists in a room, the exchanges are likely
to be blunt and delivered at high volume. That form of commerce has
often been called arrogant, but it is not arrogant per se, nor does it
imply an underlying arrogance of the speaker. Rather, in my
experience, the physicists’ discourse is a reflection of a passionate
desire to know and the intense frustration of just not getting it.
On the other hand, several characteristics of how physicists (and
sometimes scientists generally) do business suggest to me an arrogance
below the academic or human norms.
For starters, science, by its nature, has an important deflating
feature. Most scientists would agree that they can’t claim to be doing
science unless they admit up front that everything they say can, in
principle, be unambiguously proved to be garbage. I don’t know of any
movie critics who have volunteered that sentiment—nor should they.
Unusually social animals
By academic standards, physicists are unusually social animals.
Physics is sufficiently difficult that most of us find we need help to
puzzle through whatever problem we’re working on. But it’s not just
that we need help. We like visiting with colleagues in their offices
to see what they’re working on and perhaps offer a suggestion or two.
If we could somehow subtract out the frustration, most of us would say
that our blunt exchanges are fun. And many of us go out of our way in
our papers to acknowledge useful conversations.
An anecdote from my days as a teacher at a liberal arts college may
shed some light on differences between scientists and other academics.
As part of its faculty development program, the college sponsored
lunchtime talks in which a professor would share his or her research
with the rest of the faculty. Talks given by members of humanities and
social science departments were generally well attended. Talks given
by members of the science departments were generally well
attended . . . by science faculty.
I recall one such talk, given by a colleague in the physics
department, whose audience comprised scientists and one member of the
English department. She happened to be the director of faculty
development and was required to attend (but, to be fair, she did so
willingly). After my colleague’s talk, we gave him the usual grilling:
Your explanation of such and such didn’t work for me, so can you
explain it again? Would this idea address some of the worries you
described in your talk? Your comments about the Johnson rod suggest
that thus and so might be an interesting thing to look at; have you
tried that?
After a while my colleague from the English department asked if the
behavior she had just witnessed was typical of what happens when
scientists get together. When we assured her it was, she commented,
“Wow. It seems like you all are really trying to get at the truth. In
my field, we just stand up and try to show how smart we are.”
As an editor at Physics Today, part of my job is to ask experts to
critique articles we have received for publication or journal papers
on which we may report. My advisers seem to make every effort to be
fair. When they have negative things to say, they are rarely
gratuitous; a typical recommendation against covering a paper is
couched in language like, “The work, though valid and interesting,
does not rise to Physics Today’s high standards.” When I have my own
reports critiqued by outside physicists, I am consistently asked to
add names to the list of folks I have cited for an accomplishment.
A large part of my job is to try to better the expository articles of
highly regarded physicists. I suggest that the word here is not what
the author meant, that the logic there isn’t convincing, that the
organization is not transparent, that the figures are cluttered and
the captions uninformative. (I try to do all that in the most
diplomatic way possible!) I have found that, with zero exceptions, the
authors take my suggestions seriously. Some of my ideas, I learn, are
misguided, and some of them don’t convince the author. But in the
great majority of cases, at the end of the day the authors thank me
for numerous small and not-so-small improvements.
Physicists: social, fair if not generous toward colleagues, open to
the possibility that their ideas may be wrong, and remarkably willing
to accept criticism. Sounds to me like the opposite of arrogant.