A couple of thoughts about physicists

Here’s the truth: I did not study biology until late in my life. I hated the subject in high school. I was much more attracted to quantitative disciplines, such as mathematics and physics. So when the time came to choose a field of study, I enrolled at the University of Geneva to study physics. I will never forget the first day of the semester: we were about 40 in the room, this old classroom with wooden chairs and tables, and the always present blackboard. The introductory lecture was given by the president of the Section de Physique. Among all the administrative details, he used a sentence that I will never forget: “you are physicists, now. Sure, physicists in the making, but physicists nonetheless”. That’s how it started.

I loved studying physics. It was exciting, and it felt like everyday we learned so many new exciting things. And the more we learned, the more we were capable, and the more we were capable, the more we understood. I suspect that this is a general shared feeling among all students, but for some reason we all assumed that it was something specific to physics. Maybe because in all courses there was always a single thread necessary to learn and understand: math. Everything was about math. You know the famous sentence attributed to Feynman, “shut up and calculate”? That was a typical mantra among students. Nothing matters if you cannot calculate it formally. That’s what I learned in my bachelor, and that’s what I learned in my master too. Rigorous mathematical reasoning is the only thing that matters.

There was another aspect among me and my classmates. We all were proud. And we were all joking about who was the most stupid. There was some sort of macho culture (we had very few girls in our year) where getting a wrong result was sign of lack of intelligence and talent. We venerated (and envied) those who got the best grades without studying much. In our mind, that was sign of real talent. And we made other jokes too: mostly against people who weren’t physicists. Biologists, mainly. In our worldview, physics was the only Real Science, and we separated the world in “hard sciences” (physics) and “soft sciences” (all the others). It was all “in good fun”, except that it wasn’t.

By my 4th year (first year of MSc), I realized that I wasn’t really interested in pursuing a career studying exotic physical objects such as quasi-normal black holes and gravitons - two of the subjects I was exposed to. I flirted for a while with the idea of switching to a MSc in history of physics, but then decided to opt for what had been my one love since the second year: mathematical modeling of natural phenomena. For a theoretical physicist in Geneva, the easiest access was through climatology. So in my MSc thesis I studied the isolation properties of snow layer on sea ice. After finishing, I started searching for a PhD position and couldn’t find any. While I didn’t despair, I also started to look at different options: one that I had an interest in for a long time - mostly influenced by Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy - was the mathematical modeling of living things. So I started to google PhD positions in biomathematics et similia, and found a position at the University of Bern in population genetics. I applied and was accepted, and I never looked back.

I would be a liar if I said that my upbringing within physics did not leave a mark on me. I must have been quite obnoxious when I started my PhD. See, even though I didn’t say things like “biology is a soft science” anymore, I still thought that way. The fact that I studied physics always popped up in the first couple of sentences after introducing myself. It was only a couple of years later that I started disliking that pattern: I started to meet other people who like me studied physics and switched to biology, and started to find many of them obnoxious for those very same reasons. To this, it definitely helped that during my first two years of PhD I had no idea of my own field. I wasn’t doing the necessary work to understand, convinced as I was that mathematical skills were enough. It was a truly humbling experience. I started working on the elephant in the room, my identity, as it started to be clear in my head that I was a biologist now, not a physicist. I was also lucky that my mentor helped me developing this identity within the field. “Do you want to apply mathematical tools to answer biological questions, or do you want to solve mathematical equations that may have an application in biology?” he asked me. I decided that biology was my calling, not mathematics.

In those first years as a PhD student, when someone outside of academia asked me “what do you do?”, my answer was always “I studied physics, but now I’m doing a PhD in population genetics”. Even before that I had noticed how much attention was given to the fact that I studied physics (“physics! Oh my, you must be very smart!”). Later, when I switched my answer to “I’m a biologist”, I realized that I was receiving completely different responses. I came to the conclusion that even socially, physicists are considerd more intelligent and talented than biologists. This of course is related to the high regard that we have in our society for people who are good at mathematical thinking. I realize now that the world of physicists is a world where entitlement and superiority are part of the teaching - and it’s not completely their fault, it’s a social problem! Since the 20s and 30s we heard that physicists and mathematicians won wars, and people like Einstein became mainstream stars; later, people like Feynman, Kaku, Greene and many others became also very well known outside of academia. How many extremely famous chemists do you know? How many biologists? What if I told you about Dobzhansky, or Lewontin? Do you know who they are? How about Haldane? All people that contributed to genetics as much as Feynman contributed to quantum field theory, yet nobody knows them.

Society is stacked on the side of physicists, convinced that to be a physicists one must have some particular rare talent. And in this context, it’s not surprising that physicists are allowed to talk about other fields in ways that most other scientists wouldn’t even try to. See how many physicists support absurd theories about race and feminism. To be clear, this is not to say that only physicist can believe abject and false theories; they are just more susceptibles to believing these theories, as they “grew” in an environment that focuses so much on quantitative skills and not enough on ethics and behavioral skills. Most physicists aren’t aware of the impossibility of complete objectivity, yet they think that their quantitative skills gives them exactly that.

We should change the way we look at physicists in society, and the way we teach them about the natural world. We have to help them grow out of their God complex, and do it quick, because the large number of physicists who are supporting racist and sexist science and movements like climate change denial (yes, for real, go check comments by Nobel prize Carlo Rubbia) is doing real damage.

This article was modified since publication.

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