An Exact Science
As most students of my generation, I took a course in biology in my sophomore year of high school. Chemistry was reserved for junior year, and physics was taught in senior year. This was a logical progression in the 1960s, since biology was a descriptive science that required almost no mathematics. It was like a Victorian pin board of butterflies, arrayed by size or color, but never quantified by any numbers or theory. By the time my daughter took high school biology in the early part of this century, the entire aspect of biology had changed to the point at which I had difficulty reading her textbook. Biology had become an exact science.
Ernest Rutherford (1871-1937), a preeminent physicist of his age (Rutherfordium Rf, element 104, is named after him), and winner of the 1908 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, once said, "All science is either physics or stamp collecting." Many disciplines of science progressed from a descriptive stage (stamp collecting) to an exact science, for which physics is the archetype. Astronomy, from the Latin astrum (star or constellation) and nominare (to name), originally was just finding and naming stars. In the seventeenth century, Johannes Kepler's laws of planetary motion added a touch of mathematics. Eventually, spectrographs were fitted to larger and larger telescopes, stars were described by more and more numbers, and astronomy became an exact science. Eventually, astronomy spun-off the very mathematical subfield of astrophysics. Much the same course was followed by geology and meteorology.
The quantization of biology was assisted by physicists who crossed over to the discipline. Max Delbruck, a theoretical physicist who received his Ph.D. in 1930, was encouraged to enter biology by no less than Niels Bohr. He went on to win the 1969 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for work on the replication mechanism and genetics of viruses. Another distinguished physicist who migrated to biology was Francis Crick, who with James Watson, Rosalind Franklin, and another physicist, Maurice Wilkins, deciphered the role of DNA in organisms. Crick originally began a physics Ph.D. on the viscosity of water at high temperatures, but abandoned this for defense work during World War II. After the war, Crick migrated into biology research along with a large troop of physical scientists.
The transition of biology from a descriptive to an exact science was not wholly welcomed by all biologists. Many decried this paradigm shift as mere "physics envy," in analogy to a Freudian theory that would shock any feminist. The alleged aversion of biologists to mathematics has spawned many humorous stories. One of the more interesting accounts is how biologists mix chemical solutions [1]. Instead of weighing reagents, they use descriptive categories for quantity of matter
• Some.
• A bunch.
• A whole bunch.
• A ton.
• All of it.
• See if somebody else has any.
• We'll have to buy some more.
At least two of my colleagues in Morristown have degrees in Biology. I'm happy to say that their laboratory technique is far superior!
References:
1. Physics envy among biologists: fact or fiction?
2. The nature of scientific truth
3. Biology and 'physics envy'
4.Erwin Schrodinger, "What is Life? (1944).