Soft Science Envy

 If I look at a correlation plot in biology, sociology or psychology, I can understand what they mean with “physics envy.” Physics is the field of precision measurement, the field of hard facts, the field of unambiguous conclusions – at least that’s what it looks like from the outside. The neutron lifetime (see image to the right) tells a different story, one in which convergence clearly had a social parameter (note that jumps in measurements over the years are outside the errorbars. But in the end, the facts won and isn't the shrinking of errorbars just so amazing? That's the side of physics envy that is understandable.
There is the occasional physicist who puts his skills to use in biology, chemistry, neuroscience or the social sciences, economics, sociology and fancy new interdisciplinary mixtures thereof. Needless to say, people working in these fields aren’t always pleased about the physicists stomping on their grass, and more often than not they’re quite unsupportive.

That’s the ugly side of physics envy. It's is a great stumbling block for interdisciplinary research. You really need a masochistic gene and a high criticism tolerance to try.

Physics envy has led many researchers in other fields to develop mathematical models that create the illusion of control and precision – even if the system under question doesn’t allow for such precision. That’s the hazardous side of physics envy.

But after having read Kahneman’s and Ramachandran's book, I clearly have developed a soft science envy!

Kahneman tells the reader throughout his book how he cooked up hypotheses and ways to test them in the blink of an eye. His hypotheses were frequently triggered by reflecting on the shortcomings of his own perceptions, then assuming he’s an average person. He won the Nobel Prize for Economics for the insight that human decisions can be inconsistent. Ramachandran, who made career learning about the neurobiology from patients with brain damage, literally has the subjects of his papers walking into his office. This is not to belittle the insights that we have gained from their creativity and the benefits that they have brought. But the flipside of physics envy is that not only the facts are hard, the way to them is too