#and also there’s ethical rules against the really wild bio shit
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You don’t have to touch anything gross to study physics
Pretty much all serious biology is going to involve getting messy or getting EXTREMELY EXTREMELY EXTREMELY clean
Okay something that bothers me is the fact physics is seen as the more prestigious of the three main sciences, with biology at the bottom and chemistry in the middle. Like. I doubt most people could name a famous biologist, but they could name 5 famous physicists. Why are Albert Einstein and Stephen hawking household names but Norman Borlaug and Jonas Salk aren't?
Not to dismiss the accomplishments of Einstein or Hawking, or their genius, but their actual tangible contributions to society have been miniscule compared to that of Borlaug or Salk who have each saved LITERALLY hundreds of millions, if not billions, of lives each. Half the food on your plate was probably grown thanks to Borlaug and Salk is the reason half your siblings didn't die of polio as a kid.
Sure Einsteins theory of relatively is important for modern satellite communications but really though how can it compare?
This is coming from someone who studied physics. I love physics, and years ago when i was at uni I looked down at biology and so did everyone else studying physics. And I know others did too. Retroactively of course I know this was so very wrong.
If society as a whole started treating biology with more respect then maybe more students would go into that field. If we had rockstars of medicine and agricultural science that were household names rather than just physicists? think of how many more lives could be saved, how many more lives could be improved.
I'm not saying physics isn't important, and more scientists of any kind is always good, but proportionally I think societies priorities are a little skewd.
#biology#i think it probably has something to do with complexity#physics is all about identifying quantifying and calculating variables#see ‘spherical chicken in a vacuum’ joke#physics is all hard math and tangible and firm#biology… is much more complicated#we don’t even know what half the variables are#there are less hard answers and it’s complicated to test because life itself is a complicated bitch#physics promises answers to mysteries of the universe#biology at high levels involves admitting we cannot even define a hard taxonomy because the world does not work the way our brains want it t#to#there are no hard categories#biology is the science of life#shifting and immutable and changing and just you fucking try and simplify it#people don’t like that there are unknowable answers#you can do all the math you want in biology but what you need is poetry#and also there’s ethical rules against the really wild bio shit#like cloning and making cats glow in the dark#(they did it with fish it’s a thing we’re just not allowed to keep doing it)
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