Regarding Bill W.'s criteria for being a science:
>Do you consider analyzing the fossil record and other geological history
>stuff to be a (hard) science in the Bacononian sense? seems to me this as
>well as much of cosmology, anthropology, sociology, psychology, and the
>like should be in the "arts" column. I'd go so far as to say if it can't
>be reduced to experimental physics (in the sense that chemistry is
>actually a branch of physics) and math it ain't science.
Ah, a man who's willing to be politically incorrect in public. We
physicists are sometimes accused of harboring such thoughts, and some
do have them. But the discrete among us tend to keep our mouths shut in
a mixed company in academia.
BTW, Bill, what would you do with a field like astrophysics (and
cosmology you did mention) that are not reducible directly to
*experimental* physics, but which *do* reduce to *theoretical* physics
and to *lots* of mathematics? The theoretical physics itself tends to
have *other* confrontations with experiment in other areas (i.e. particle
accelerators, etc.) than are found in the field in question. And often
the field in question does provide observations--if not actual controlled
*experiments*--that do constrain the theorizing to a great degree.
David Bowman
David_Bowman@georgetowncollege.edu
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