It has a germ of truth, but I think it’s deeply misleading. In particular, it needs some kind of nod to the importance of relevance to everyday life. E.g., it would be more serious to claim “all science is either physics, or the systematizing side of some useful discipline like engineering, or stamp collecting.” Pure stamp collecting endeavors have nothing to stop them from veering into the behavior stereotypically associated with modern art or the Sokal hoax. Fields like paleobotany or astronomy (or, indeed, physics itself in near-unobservable limits) can become arbitrarily pure stamp collecting when the in-group controls funding. More applied fields like genetics or immunology or synthetic chemistry or geology are messy and disordered compared to pure physics, and do resemble stamp collecting in that messiness. But true stamp collecting is not merely messy, but also arbitrarily driven by fashion. To the extent that a significant amount of the interest (and money) associated with an academic field flows from applications like agriculture and medicine and resource extraction, it tends not to dive so deeply into true free-floating arbitrariness of pure stamp collecting.
I’m not as hard on stamp-collecting as you are. Admittedly, you need some sort of theory for why the information you’re collecting is of interest, but if the information isn’t widely and and carefully collected, the theoreticians don’t have anything to work with.
I wasn’t trying to be hard on that kind of collecting, though I was making a distinction. To me, choosing stamps (as opposed to, e.g., butterflies or historical artifacts) as a type specimen suggests that the collecting is largely driven by fashion or sentiment or some other inner or social motive, not because the objects are of interest for piecing together a vast disorderly puzzle found in the outer physical world. Inner and social motives are fine with me, though my motivation in such things tends to things other than collecting. (E.g., music and Go and Chess.)
E.g., it would be more serious to claim “all science is either physics, or the systematizing side of some useful discipline like engineering, or stamp collecting.”
As far as I can see, sitting in the mechanical engineering department of a state university, engineering research is a combination of physics and stamp collecting.
I thought it was Heinlein, but it’s actually Ernest Rutherford.
It has a germ of truth, but I think it’s deeply misleading. In particular, it needs some kind of nod to the importance of relevance to everyday life. E.g., it would be more serious to claim “all science is either physics, or the systematizing side of some useful discipline like engineering, or stamp collecting.” Pure stamp collecting endeavors have nothing to stop them from veering into the behavior stereotypically associated with modern art or the Sokal hoax. Fields like paleobotany or astronomy (or, indeed, physics itself in near-unobservable limits) can become arbitrarily pure stamp collecting when the in-group controls funding. More applied fields like genetics or immunology or synthetic chemistry or geology are messy and disordered compared to pure physics, and do resemble stamp collecting in that messiness. But true stamp collecting is not merely messy, but also arbitrarily driven by fashion. To the extent that a significant amount of the interest (and money) associated with an academic field flows from applications like agriculture and medicine and resource extraction, it tends not to dive so deeply into true free-floating arbitrariness of pure stamp collecting.
I’m not as hard on stamp-collecting as you are. Admittedly, you need some sort of theory for why the information you’re collecting is of interest, but if the information isn’t widely and and carefully collected, the theoreticians don’t have anything to work with.
I wasn’t trying to be hard on that kind of collecting, though I was making a distinction. To me, choosing stamps (as opposed to, e.g., butterflies or historical artifacts) as a type specimen suggests that the collecting is largely driven by fashion or sentiment or some other inner or social motive, not because the objects are of interest for piecing together a vast disorderly puzzle found in the outer physical world. Inner and social motives are fine with me, though my motivation in such things tends to things other than collecting. (E.g., music and Go and Chess.)
As far as I can see, sitting in the mechanical engineering department of a state university, engineering research is a combination of physics and stamp collecting.