Professional banter is as old as professions. This is a dramatization of my idle chatter on Saturday, when I bumped into someone that does condensed matter physics for a living. Bear in mind that this was a fun conversation and we were laughing all around.
Other person: I heard you do physics.
Me: yes.
Other person: What kind of physics?
Me: I work on high energy theory, more precisely string theory and such.
Other person: Ha ha. That’s not considered to be `physics’ in my community.
Me: I’m also interested in quantum computing …
Other person: There is still hope for you.
Well, seeing how many times I’ve heard the phrase “that’s not physics” uttered in different contexts when talking about different sub-communities of physicists as relating to each other I can happily say that I don’t do physics, even though I do.
By taking the union of all such statements that “X is not physics”, it is trivial to show that physics does not, in fact, exist. Figuring out what we’re actually doing with our lives is left as an exercise to the interested reader.
New here, just dropping by. Well, string theory is not empirically testable, does not account for dark energy and dark matter, and can never be complete and consistent due to Godel’s incompleteness. Other than that, s’all good. Pop some brewski.
Peace,
Ik
You should have pointed out to the condensed matter physicist that his discipline, when Boltzmann was alive, was also not considered to be physics by many.