| HN Mirror

What makes physics a science and psychology not? Are our brains made of the same matter as the rest of the universe? Surely so. Is it because psychology seeks to describe/predict aggregated phenomena? This is a non-starter. Take for example the derivation of Boyle's law, pv = k, for pressure. Surely this derivation was the result of real scientific inquiry, despite that equation merely describing the aggregate of underspecified and innumerable interactions? Is it instead because brains are too complex for scientific inquiry? I quite understand that, despite the immense technical prowess of physicists and engineers, the problems they seek to elucidate are all said and done, easy. Easy because the complexity is low, easy because the problem space is limited, easy because you can see and control more of the entire picture. Is psychology not a science because its problems are just too hard for physicists to tackle? Or to tackle in way they'd prefer: easy, controlled, identifiable, enumerated??? Is it because you can never *actually* rerun a psychology experiment because people are always different always changing? Well, please refer to the experiments deriving Boyle's law. Each experiment was not an exact replica of the previous, because the innumerable collisions/interactions of molecules will never take the same path through time, no matter how hard we try, because, well hell, quantum physics, or so I am told. Buy Boyle did derive some useful relationships, despite the heterogeneity of subjects/runs, and so has psychology.