[dekhn]

There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences, and physics definitely lies on the "more testable and verifiable" than chemistry, biology, and neuroscience (not neurology- that's a form of medicine). Many of the biological systems we work with, we don't even really test and verify, especially not at the level that a large-scale particle physics experiment would.

If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion (and I think people with experience across the continuum would agree with me).

[ruthmarx]

> If you want to insist that biology is as testable and verifiable as physics, I have no interest in arguing with you- it's just a difference of opinion

I just think the whole "There is a continuum of hardness within the quantitative sciences" is irrelevant. It's more of a binary thing, and biology is a hard science, period. But sure, we can agree to disagree.

Without any doubt though, biology is not a 'soft' science.

[davorak]

You seem to agree that the testability is not binary:

> Soft sciences are those that don't lend themselves to testing and verification very well, like economics and psychology.

But want hard to only used in a binary fashion with some heuristic triggering the step function from soft to hard.

People do talk using the term that way. They also use it as a continuum saying one field is harder than an another. I quoted the terms, "hard" and "soft" in my message above because the terms are used in a few different ways and are not rigorously defined. They only need a rough definition to make the point I was making though.