Who's Afraid of Physicists?

As some regular readers may have picked up, I can't say enough good things about, or steal great links from, Clive Thompson's Collision Detection.  This isn't just because the name of his blog sounds like something *I* should be doing as a physicist (although it's actually a concept from computer graphics and video games), but because his job as a top-notch science and technology journalist keeps him plugged in to many many interesting stories emerging out of the web and blogosphere.

His piece from Wednesday has an amusing intersection with high energy physics, although it's really a Nature story about hip-hop's social networks.  Reginald Smith of MIT's Sloan School of Business has mapped out 30,000 songs and 6,522 rappers and found

that on average it takes a chain of just 2.9 people in the network to connect one rapper to another; that is, three degrees of separation. This compares with 2.5 people for the network of movie actors (popularized in the Kevin Bacon game ), 3.6 for company board directors³, and 5.9 for collaborations between high-energy physicists⁴.

Great: now among other honorifics (inventing the web, etc.), physicists now have the additional distinction of defining "six degrees of separation".  Maybe we should submit that to NIST?

Of course, my first reaction was that this can't be right: I know a lot of people from a lot of different fields.  But on reflection, I realize that's because of my various interests and because of a few summer schools I attended as a graduate student.  Since then, I do tend to see the same people over and over again, but in far-flung locales.

So what are we afraid of?  Each other?  I plan to read that Newman paper cited above (for the 5.9) ASAP to find out.

Comments

[Pierre Asselin]

Hi Peter,

I have a problem with physicists, even if it's an interesting one.

I guess I am sort of old fashioned because I feel more comfortable with the physics of the visible than the physics of the invisible. It seems to me that the physicists of today need to be mathematicians first and foremost, they're not exactly hands-on scitentists and it certainly is not their fault.
The problem I have is that when I try to explain that there might be a problem with one of the corollaries from the Axioms or Laws of Motion, in the Principia, I don't have the language that would be required to be understood.
I can explain it to any of my friends, or to other scientists like a chemist, but when it comes to physicists I can't be precise enough and when I think I am using the right term I realise that that the words I use refer to something else in physics.
Anyway, if you agreed to take a look at the blog I would appreciate it. I gave the blog's adress as the URL and the title of my blog is: "The trouble with corollary 3". The trouble being that corolllary 3 is, well, simply wrong.

Sincerely,

Pierre Asselin,
Québec City
Canada