"jane" wrote in message
...
On Thu, 03 Feb 2005 10:01:10 +0000, bigboard
wrote:

~Nick Maclaren wrote:
~
~ In article ,
~ jane wrote:
~
~I love that quote. Would have liked to put it at the start of my
~thesis but at the time my external examiner wasn't sorted and
could
~have been a medical physicist or a clued-up medic and I didn't
want
~the latter to get rebuffed and be more likely to fail me!
~
~ Whereas I loathe it intensely. It wouldn't matter if so many
boneheaded
~ physicists didn't believe it - and extrapolate it to mean that
they don't
~ need to learn from other sciences :-(

Nah, we just used it at Uni to wind up the Chemists!
(Best way was to mention that chemistry is a subset of physics. You
got the best effect after they'd had 2-3 pints on a Friday night :-)

The quote never fails to wind up every other scientific discipline.
As
all physics students know well :-)

And we must know
If it moves, it's biology
If it reacts (or blows up, or smells) it's chemistry
If it doesn't work, it's physics.

which is a negative comment on school physics lessons! (Though
having
had a capacitor blow up in my face once in a physics lesson, I could
alter it a bit).

However!!!
Anyone who is a gardener is an amateur botanist and biologist (and
entomologist!) . If you test soil for pH, and add matter/compounds
to
correct soil problems, you're a chemist. And we are all also
amateur
meteorologists (at least in Europe!).

Any others? I'm sure I've missed several.

If we select seeds we ar geneticists.

So there we are, every gardener is a scientist. Also an artist
(after
all, we paint with flowers and design our plots.) What better hobby
can one have to cover so many disciplines equally?

~Aha! A stamp collector.

Wouldn't you love to know what Rutherford got as a reaction when he
originally said it? I'm sure it got one...

He was very careful about where and when he said it.

Franz