[yafbum]

A physicist friend used to quote Rutherford, all science is either physics or stamp collecting.

By which my friend meant, physics has a way of being checked by physical reality in a way that math or computer science don't.

His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive around the coil so that, for a fraction of a second, the magnetic field at the center of the coil became the most intense ever built by mankind, before the whole setup was destroyed by the splattering of liquid copper thousands of degrees hot. Errors and miscalculations in that work environment meant that people could die unpleasant deaths very quickly.

So when he looked at math PhD students who at most got chalk dust onto their sweater, calling themselves scientists, he disagreed.

[kens]

That's a rather unusual interpretation of the quote. According to several books, the meaning of that quote is that science is either mathematical and quantitative, or descriptive. In other words, you're either attempting to understand the dynamics of the subject or merely collecting interesting facts and naming items of interest.

[civilitty]

> His area of work was extreme magnetic fields. Experimenting meant building giant copper coils, running enough current in them to melt them in place, and then very quickly detonating explosive around the coil so that, for a fraction of a second, the magnetic field at the center of the coil became the most intense ever built by mankind, before the whole setup was destroyed by the splattering of liquid copper thousands of degrees hot.

Explosively pumped flux compression generators [1] are fun!

That’s how real EMPs are made, in case anyone is interested in a career in super villainy but doesn’t know where to start.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_comp...

[59nadir]

Thanks, this will shave years off of my post-retirement projects!

For real, though, I've always found things like these fascinating.

I used to be very interested in working with software for weapons (specifically for fighter aircraft) because they've got very interesting problems to solve that usually are very direct. The amount of irrelevant code paths you can add, the amount of really far-away external stuff seems very limited at least in theory, so it seems a very interesting field to work in.

I could never get over that it would feel very bad being part of a process that ultimately might end in killing someone, though, so it was a non-starter.

[skrebbel]

I used to wonder why Dijkstra was so arrogant, and then I learned that he graduated in theoretical physics.

[BeetleB]

> So when he looked at math PhD students who at most got chalk dust onto their sweater, calling themselves scientists, he disagreed.

I've not found mathematicians calling themselves scientists. In fact, it's usually the opposite: they boast that they are not scientists and are not limited by petty reality.

[computerfriend]

Leave it to a physicist to misinterpret that quotation.

[kwhitefoot]

Perhaps you could enlighten us oh wise one.

[computerfriend]

The quotation has no connection to whether you can check your results with experimentation.

But my comment is a joke about their dismissive attitude towards mathematicians.

[sethammons]

Related to the correct interpretation of that quote:

https://xkcd.com/435/