Physics Envy Research Articles

Do current concepts of One Health suffer from the physics envy

ABSTRACT The current models of One Health appear to be suffering from a elevated emphasis on a small area of interface involving humans, environment and animals. This may largely be because of an extension of our understanding of physical science to biological world, which, though is far more complexer.

The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein

Reviewed by: The Gist of Reading by Andrew Elfenbein Joey Frantz (bio) The Gist of Reading, by Andrew Elfenbein (Stanford University Press, 2018), 272 pp. Andrew Elfenbein's The Gist of Reading isn't about meticulous, erudite, critical reading. It's about what literary reading is like for most readers most of the time. What exactly goes on in someone's head when they read, say, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie? The gist of The Gist of Reading is that readers forget most of what they read but construct a "gist representation" that boils a text down to its essentials. This, alone, is obvious, but the questions Elfenbein is interested in are: (1) what is remembered, and what is forgotten? and (2) how can we know? He takes both psychological and historical approaches. The psychological [End Page 150] approaches are ambitious and promising but lack explanatory power, while the historical angle is merely illuminating. A Victorian literary scholar and professor of English, Elfenbein sought training in experimental psychology so he could ask basic questions about reading. For example, how can we know what word association really is? One way is to ask experimental test subjects to make what's called a lexical decision, that is, to present them with words and see how quickly they can decide whether a word is real or made up. It turns out that people identify a word as being real more quickly if it is preceded by a related word, i.e., they are more likely to identify bird as a real word if it was preceded by sparrow than if it was preceded by an unrelated word. What makes this finding interesting is that this effect holds true even if the first word (such as sparrow before bird) was presented so briefly that test subjects had no conscious awareness of having seen it. Elfenbein glosses over many studies related to sound (such as alliteration and rhyme); other studies deal with how test subjects make sense of what they read. Though provocative, such research is hard to use in a more specific, literary context. One reason is that whatever unconscious work goes into the reading process cannot, by definition, be verified by readers; unconscious means unconscious. When I read "The Hollow Men," the unconscious work that goes into understanding "A penny for the old guy" isn't something I can report on. Alas, Elfenbein falls into the familiar trap of making banal claims imbued with an aura of technical precision. For example, Elfenbein works with the distinction between online reading experiences (how we experience a text as we read it) versus offline experiences (how our brain processes a text once we're done with it). He uses the concept of a situation model to describe a reader's representation of what's going on in a text. These terms are useful in and of themselves. But consider how Elfenbein uses them in this sentence: The offline retrievability of long-term situation models may depend on online "depth of processing." Since "offline" means "after we're done reading the text" and "situation models" means "mental models of what happened in a text," this sentence simply means that how well you remember what happens in a text may depend on how deeply you read it. Another term, activation, is used in research on memory, but in this specific sentence, activation just dresses up a mundane idea: Depending on the reader, emotional sympathy with certain concepts or the ability to connect concepts to personal experience may increase activation. [End Page 151] The problem isn't that Elfenbein wants to interweave psychology and criticism; the problem is that the psychology doesn't always provide new insights. In a particularly egregious moment, Elfenbein actually offers an equation to describe how entertaining a text is: entertainment value = A (interest) + B (self-relevance) + C (transportation) This is offered as "a model that has predictive value," but it simply does not. Of course Elfenbein would not claim that the values of the equation could be calculated precisely, but since "interest," "self-relevance," and "transportation" are fuzzy concepts, the equation is woefully imprecise and reeks of Physics Envy. Elfenbein seems to admit...

From Walras's Physics Envy to Winiarski's Mécanique Sociale

In 1898-1900, Leon Winiarski published his Mecanique sociale as an attempt to extend Walras's general equilibrium theory from the field of economics to the whole spectrum of the social sciences. This was done through an abundant use of analogies, including physical analogies. Given Walras's own physics envy, Winiarski felt encouraged by his elder to pursue his project in this way. This paper asks whether Winiarski's Mecanique sociale was an attempt to seriously take into account Walras's physics envy. To answer this question, we reconsider Winiarski's interpretation of Walras's general equilibrium theory, by focusing on a particular footnote found in Winiarski’s writings.

A Purposive Evolution?

A Purposive Evolution?

London’s Business Schools: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly?

As an educational hotspot, London is a forerunner laboratory of simultaneous neoliberal policies, deregulation, and powerful governmental interventions in Western Europe. The UK’s crowded capital hosts around 40 university-based, degree-awarding business schools. In addition, an eclectic mix of 200 various kinds of operators offer business and management degrees, including a large number of so-called ‘alternative providers’ (APs). Despite a unifying ‘London factor’, we assert that there is no single business school business within this stratified and heterogeneous educational hub. More specifically we ask, what types of business schools exist in London, and how have they emerged? Based on empirical analysis, we present a typology of five kinds of business schools: Physics Envy, Pluralist, Production Line, Pragmatist, and Phony. We argue that our typology helps to understand both historical diversity and recent emerging models. More importantly, the typology helps to anticipate the potential impacts of higher education policies and thus makes it possible to describe, explain, and predict new forms of business and management education.

Peter Middleton. Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After. ix + 318 pp., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $45 (cloth).

Peter Middleton. <i>Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After</i>. ix + 318 pp., index. Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press, 2015. $45 (cloth).

Physics Envy: American Poetry and Science in the Cold War and After. Peter Middleton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. Pp. vi+318.

Middleton has written a thorough and persuasive argument about methodological influences on poetics, contextualizing poetry reaction within a broader cultural “physics envy.” It offers an important contribution to the field in moving beyond the influence of scientific discovery to describe the complex and in some cases two-way interactions between disciplines often seen to speak such different languages.

Physics envy: American poetry and science in the Cold War and after

At the close of the Second World War, modernist poets found themselves in an increasingly scientific world, where natural and social sciences claimed exclusive rights to knowledge of both matter and mind. Following the overthrow of the Newtonian worldview and the recent, shocking displays of the power of the atom, physics led the way, with other disciplines often turning to the methods and discoveries of physics for inspiration. In Physics Envy, Peter Middleton examines the influence of science, particularly physics, on American poetry since World War II. He focuses on such diverse poets as Charles Olson, Muriel Rukeyser, Amiri Baraka, and Rae Armantrout, among others, revealing how the methods and language of contemporary natural and social sciences—and even the discourse of the leading popular science magazine Scientific American—shaped their work. The relationship, at times, extended in the other direction as well: leading physicists such as Robert Oppenheimer, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrodinger were interested in whether poetry might help them explain the strangeness of the new, quantum world. Physics Envy is a history of science and poetry that shows how ultimately each serves to illuminate the other in its quest for the true nature of things.

Physics envy: Trying to fit a square peg into a round hole

Pothos & Busemeyer (P&B) argue that classical probability (CP) fails to describe human decision processes accurately and should be supplanted by quantum probability. We accept the premise, but reject P&B's conclusion. CP is a prescriptive framework that has inspired a great deal of valuable research. Also, because CP is used across the sciences, it is a cornerstone of interdisciplinary collaboration.

Physics envy: why energy policy is more art than science

Physics envy: why energy policy is more art than science

"PHYSICS ENVY" AND ENGINEERING DESIGN

“Physics envy” is the condition where non-physicists attempt to model their discipline after physics in the hope of gaining credibility. This ailment is not uncommon among engineers and its negative impact is most strongly felt in engineering design. Biology offers some insights into this phenomenon for it, too, suffers from “physics envy” but has the luxury of a strong philosophical base to draw on. Much of what separates engineering and biology from physics can be attributed to a preoccupation with function. Within the paradigm of physics, however, function is a foreign concept. We can ponder the function of a human organ or a mechanical part, but the entities of physics, such as atoms, have no functions, only effects. Function implies the possibility of failure, such as a heart failure or a mechanical breakdown, but atoms never fail; they simply are. Function speaks of systems which cannot be contained within spatiotemporal boundaries, boundaries which physics cannot transgress. “Physics envy” therefore serves to undermine research and practice in engineering design.

The Evolution of Eupathics: The Historical Roots of Subjective Measures of Wellbeing

This paper traces the historical roots of subjective measures of wellbeing, that is, measures designed to represent happiness, satisfaction, or other “positive” or desirable mental states. While it is often suggested that these measures are a modern invention, I argue that they have a long and rich history that conforms to Theodore M. Porter’s general account of measurement in social and behavioral science. Subjective measures emerged in marital success studies, educational psychology, and personality psychology in the 1920s and 30s, and were further shaped by the epidemiology of mental health, gerontology, and the social indicator movement in the 1960s and 70s. Consistent with Porter’s account, these measures emerged in applied rather than theoretical branches of social and behavioral science, and they did so not as a result of physics envy, but rather as a result of a moral impulse to improve society; quantification was intended to make up for perceived deficiencies in unaided human judgment; and radical disagreements about the nature of wellbeing did not impede efforts to measure it – indeed, in time, there was considerably more agreement about how to measure wellbeing than about how to define it.

Warning: Physics Envy May be Hazardous to Your Wealth!

The quantitative aspirations of economists and financial analysts have for many years been based on the belief that it should be possible to build models of economic systems - and financial markets in particular - that are as predictive as those in physics. While this perspective has led to a number of important breakthroughs in economics, physics envy has also created a false sense of mathematical precision in some cases. We speculate on the origins of physics envy, and then describe an alternate perspective of economic behavior based on a new taxonomy of uncertainty. We illustrate the relevance of this taxonomy with two concrete examples: the classical harmonic oscillator with some new twists that make physics look more like economics, and a quantitative equity market-neutral strategy. We conclude by offering a new interpretation of tail events, proposing an uncertainty checklist with which our taxonomy can be implemented, and considering the role that quants played in the current financial crisis.

Physics envy

PurposeThis paper seeks to identify and discuss a phenomenon with a hidden but severe impact on the conduct of research and teaching in marketing.Design/methodology/approachSolicited as a viewpoint contribution, with permission to think aloud.FindingsPhysics, as the archetypal “proper” science, has exerted an undue and malign influence within universities on perceptions of scholarliness in “soft” sciences such as marketing, and hence on the applicability of its research and teaching. But the anti‐science commentators may protest too much; the key question is how science is applied. Physics envy could therefore have a positive outcome, if debate is encouraged.Practical implicationsThere are obvious implications for the structure of research and teaching in university departments and sub‐departments of marketing, in the UK and elsewhere.Originality/valueA polemic, but one with a balanced conclusion.

Phage λ takes the first exit

Once upon a time, biologists were accused of physics envy, of wanting universal laws and neat equations. The opposite could now be true, with physicists and mathematicians looking to biology for challenging problems and complex systems. Their contribution is often to recognize that a biological system resembles a mathematical framework for which a set of solutions already exists: the same equations have the same solutions, irrespective of their origin. This approach is illustrated by a recent model developed by Aurell and Sneppen [1] that frames the transition between lytic and lysogenic phases of bacteriophage replication as a first exit problem, which is a way of characterizing the expected time at which a random process will end.

Making social science matter: why social inquiry fails and how it can succeed again

ABSTRACT This book is a thoughtful antidote to the simple views that see social science as a science like any other-positivistic science. It begins with a well-grounded empirical case of the development and application of expert knowledge, then moves through consideration of context and values, the centrality of power, and a reconsideration of the Greek roots of modern knowledge. It concludes with some salient observations based on the author's own feedback and research practice. Making Science Matter: Why Inquiry Fails and How Can Succeed Again. Bent Flyvbjerg: Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 205 Pages. INTRODUCTION is one of those phrases that, as an apprentice social scientist, I wished I had heard about 30 years ago. I was studying for a doctorate degree then, a process in which much musing was centered on some central issues in the philosophy of social science. In the texts that I read and the debates that I encountered there was a lot of about physics envy, that is. What was in short supply was much to make one feel confident as a social science researcher. Instead, rather like a character in a Beckett play, one was waiting for a character-the great deliverer of a truly social science-that never shows up. So I had to write a thesis regardless. Of course, there were various sightings that raised anticipations in different audiences, at different times: some barracked for Parsons, others for Marx, as a great unifier while others just got on with and didn't think too much about what it might mean. They just did it. How they did seemed to be based on an assumption that, while social science isn't physics, does have some formal similarities. It has hypotheses; contains propositions; and, maybe, some covering law-like explanations. (One colleague claims that the universal relationship between the size of organizations and their increasing need for centralization is such a relation.) If only Bent Flyvbjerg's book had been available then! BEYOND THE SCIENCE WARS The author begins with the hoax played by the physicist, Alan Sokal, one of the editors of the journal Text. Most people probably know about it. Sokal (1996) submitted an article that appeared to deconstruct physics and the editors accepted and published it. Thus was the latest salvo in the debate about the two cultures fired across the bows of the global social science community. The implications were clear: for bona fide-not to say macho-real scientists, social science is unreal and unnatural: simplistic in its assumptions, short on quality controls, and peopled by beings of lesser judgment, if not intelligence, than those to be found in the Natural Science Faculties. Flyvbjerg (page 3) is quite explicit about the implications of such warfare: Social science is locked in a fight that cannot hope to win, because has accepted terms that are self-defeating. What is to be done to change these terms and avoid defeat? Go back to Aristotle and start over again, says Flyvbjerg. Eschew Aristotle's path to knowledge that routes through the virtues of either techne or episteme and instead use Aristotle's account of a prudent and wise science-one founded on phonesis-and integrate with a Foucauldian conception of power. The route to Aristotle turns out to be quite contemporary-it works through the phenomenology of human learning in the light of the Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1986) model. This is the model that demonstrates that expert learning goes far beyond knowing and using the rules to accomplish an activity. Indeed, such explicit knowledge and referral is, in fact, counter to expertise that seems to rely on tacit knowledge and intuition embedded in context much more than does on explicit and disembedded knowledge. Physics envy is closely related to Cartesian anxiety-the fear of nihilism and relativism that lies outside the borders of a strict analytical and rational scientific tradition. …

Sex may need more than one

The positive replies to our original paper (West et al., 1999) leave us in the pleasurable position of being able to keep our ®nal comments short. Kondrashov (1999) demonstrates what Seger (1999) called `physics envy'. The idea that the Mutational Deterministic hypothesis can be easily validated or rejected, once the minimum rate of deleterious mutations per genome per generation (U) is known, sounds great, especially if the magical number is U > 1. However, quantitative predictions (and assumptions) are almost always model-speci®c, so that there is unlikely to be a single, uncontroversial value, even if we ignore the large con®dence limits that are placed on estimates of U (see West et al., 1999). For instance, with reasonable levels of epistasis, a value of U > 1.5 is required (Charlesworth, 1990). If stochastic effects (which are unavoidable during the early phases of any clonal invasion) or variation in the extent of epistasis are included, then U > 2.0 is required (Howard, 1994; Otto & Feldman, 1997). In addition, irrespective of the value of U, the Mutational Deterministic hypothesis absolutely requires synergistic epistasis between deleterious mutations (Kondrashov, 1982). The idea that a single value of U will resolve the issue seems to us somewhat optimistic. We agree with Kondrashov (1999) that our particular form of pluralist explanation is required for only a small fraction (»0.2 < U < »2.0) of the entire parameter space (0 < U < ¥). However, that `small fraction' is the relevant parameter space: it is where the majority of estimates of the mutation rate in sexual species fall (West et al., 1999). A pressing goal now is to determine the virulence of parasites in the wild, and whether they in fact evolve to infect locally common host genotypes. If the latter is not true, or if parasites are not suf®ciently virulent to drive host gene frequency dynamics, then both the parasite-driven Red Queen and our particular form of pluralism are falsi®ed. We agree with Lenski (1999) that different factors may be responsible for the evolutionary origin and maintenance of sex. As we said, our discussion concerned the maintenance of sex. We also agree that experiments with Escherichia coli offer an exceptional opportunity to test for `a general tendency for genetic structures to exhibit synergistic epistasis among deleterious mutations' (Elena & Lenski, 1997). We note, however, that such experiments cannot test whether synergistic epistasis occurs in a type of organism where sexual reproduction predominates. Do larger, more complex genomes with higher mutation rates lead to synergistic epistasis (Szathmary, 1993; Falush, 1998; Hurst & Smith, 1998)? Do the higher numbers of parasites in larger species help cause truncation selection against individuals with large numbers of mutations? Estimating relevant parameters can be much harder in more complex and sexual species (West et al., 1998), but such results are crucial. We hope eventually to have a range of estimates of the mutation rate and the extent of epistasis from a number of sexual and asexual species, so that a whole slew of more subtle questions can be addressed. Red®eld's (1999) comments give us the opportunity to make the following points, orthogonal to our discussion of plurality. (1) Theoretical models suggest that the rate of crossing over is far more important than chromosome number in determining the effective amount of recombination (Burt, unpublished observations). (2) Variation in recombination rates across species are consistent with Red Queen and mutational models (Burt & Bell, 1987;

Is sex in the details?

Is sex in the details?

On Physics Envy and the Biological Clock

On Physics Envy and the Biological Clock

Reductionism and Variability in Data: A Meta-Analysis

REDUCTIONISM AND VARIABILITY IN DATA: A META-ANALYSIS ROBERT SAPOLSKY and STEVEN BALT* I A cornerstone of Western science is an acceptance of reductionism, the belief that an effective way to understand a complex system is to understand its component parts. Such a reductionist framework has been, of course, enormously successful, providing a means for understanding , analyzing, and, if necessary, repairing objects of all sorts: natural phenomena, technological creations, and human bodies. A consequence of the triumph of reductionism has been an asymmetric and often uneasy relationship among scientists, when considering disciplines that differ as to how integrative or how reductive their basic techniques are. There is a tendency for an adherent of a particularly reductive approach to view the more integrative disciplines in a manner approaching hegemony. Consider the pronouncement of Francis Crick that "The ultimate aim of the modern movement in biology is in fact to explain all biology in terms of physics and chemistry" [his emphasis; quoted in I]. Such imperialist fervor need not be restricted to the more reductive disciplines, but can be heard by any scientist viewing more integrative approaches. For example, consider the prediction of E. O. Wilson, much disparaged in behavioral science and social science circles, that disciplines such as ethology and comparative psychology ultimately "are destined to be cannibalized" by neurosciences and sociobiology [2, P- 6]. For the scientist peering from an integrative stance across the divide towards the more reductive disciplines, there is the frustration and invidiousness of "physics envy," the belief that true insight and clarity Support for this study was provided by a Bing Award; manuscript assistance was provided by Russ Fernald. *Department of Biological Sciences, Stanford University, Stanford, California 94305. Correspondence: Robert Sapolsky. FAX: 415 725 5356.© 1995 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. 0031-5982/95/3901-0933$01.00 Perspectives in Biology andMedicine, 39, 2 ¦ Winter 1996 | 193 will emerge only with increasing reductionism, leading inevitably to the physicists who proverbially only talk to God. Intrinsic to reductionism is a view about the nature of variability in data. Some variability is deemed legitimate and interesting, as it reflects as-yet-unrecognized factors in the workings of the system under study. For example, data regarding oxidative damage to DNA became less variable once it was known that mitochondrial and nuclear DNA have markedly different vulnerabilities to oxidative attack, and scientists design and interpret their experiments accordingly. From the reductive viewpoint, the other source of variability is little more than an irritant, a problem of measurement instruments—or the humans who use them—not being sufficiently precise; i.e., the variability is simply "noise" that will decrease with improved instruments. As a critical corollary, more reductive levels in science should provide instruments of measurement that are more precise; thus variability decreases, revealing more certain patterns. Most scientists and lay people probably adhere to this fairly intuitive view: it seems plausible that we can learn more about the etiology of schizophrenia, for example, by studying mutations in D2 dopamine receptors than by studying the patterns in Rorschach inkblots seen by schizophrenics. The quantitative tools of successful reductive science involve linear mathematical approaches to problems, and assumptions of additivity of component parts. A challenge to these approaches has become fashionable . This approach, often termed "chaos theory" or "nonlinear systems analysis," relies heavily on the notion that complex systems (which are widespread, as they can be a society, an organism, or a cell) can contain non-additivities and non-linearities, such that a miniscule change in one component part can have vastly amplified and unpredictable consequences (the so-called "butterfly effect"). A major consequence of this is, of course, a grave limitation on the usefulness of reductive study of the component parts of such a system. Intrinsic in the nonlinear approach is a very different view of variability . The emphasis in this new science of complexity and chaos is on the emergent properties of complex systems. In such cases, variability is not mere noise, but is intrinsic to the component parts of the system; moreover , it is independent of the scale of observation. Fractal geometry captures these features in a potent and elegant manner; as one examines a fractal...