The term physics envy is used to criticize modern writing and research of academics working in areas such as "soft sciences", philosophy, , business administration education, humanities, and Social science.
Background
The success of physics in "mathematicizing" itself, particularly since
Isaac Newton's
Principia Mathematica, is generally considered remarkable and often disproportionate compared to other areas of inquiry.
[For example, Eugene Wigner remarked "The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.", while Richard Feynman said "To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature ... If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in."] "Physics envy" refers to the envy (perceived or real) of scholars in other disciplines for the mathematical precision of fundamental concepts obtained by physicists. It is an accusation raised against disciplines (typically against
social sciences such as
economics and
psychology) when these academic areas try to express their fundamental concepts in terms of mathematics, which is seen as an unwarranted push for
reductionism.
Evolutionary biologist Ernst Mayr discusses the issue of the inability to reduce biology to its mathematical basis in his book What Makes Biology Unique?.[Mayr (2004)] Noam Chomsky discusses the ability and desirability of reduction to its mathematical basis in his article "Mysteries of Nature: How Deeply Hidden."[Chomsky (2009)] Chomsky contributed extensively to the development of the field of theoretical linguistics, a formal science.
Examples
The social sciences have been accused of possessing an inferiority complex, which has been associated with physics envy. For instance,
Positivism scientists accept a mistaken image of
natural science so it can be applied to the social sciences.
The phenomenon also exists in business strategy research as demonstrated by historian Alfred Chandler Jr.'s strategy structure model. This framework holds that a firm must evaluate the environment in order to set up its structure that will implement strategies.
Chandler also maintained that there is close connection "between mathematics, physics, and engineering graduates and the systemizing of the business strategy paradigm".
In the field of artificial intelligence (AI), physics envy arises in cases of projects that lack interaction with each other, using only one idea due to the manner by which new hypotheses are tested and discarded in the pursuit of one true intelligence.
See also
Notes
External links
-
Overcoming ‘Physics Envy’, op-ed by two political scientists. New York Times, published March 30, 2012
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Physics Envy: "quants" and financial models, essay and book review of Models Behaving Badly by Emanuel Derman. Review by Burton Malkiel, WSJ, December 14, 2011
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[3] Andrew Lo (MIT Sloan School) and Mark Mueller (MIT Sloan School and MIT Center for Theoretical Physics), "Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth!" published in the Journal of Investment Management, Volume 8, Number 2, Second Quarter 2010 [4]
