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uBack in my undergrad days, there was a faculty colloquium given by a physical chemist, who started his talk by defining what, exactly, a physics chemist does: "A physicist is a scientist who builds an apparatus, buys a sample, and then does an experiment. A chemist is a scientist who buys an apparatus, makes a sample, and then does an experiment. A physical chemist is a person who builds an apparatus, makes a sample, and then does an experiment."

OK, it's not side-splittingly funny, but I was reminded of it yesterday when we got another batch of student chemistry talks at lunch. I'm used to physics talks, where the first few minutes are spent giving a schematic of the apparatus, explaining how it works, and how it was put together. Chemistry talks, on the other hand, tend to have statements like "We did fluorescence measurements using an HP 8675309 Quantum-o-rama Fluorometer," followed by five minutes of mind-numbing (to a physicist) reaction diagrams and acronyms ("We titrated this with a 7 micro-molar solution of methyl-ethyl-iso-butyl-fluoro-ketamine (MEBUFUK), mixed with PDQDDT, and did a HARVEY assay to see that we'd produced..."). I can't really recall a physics talk where the speaker just gave the manufacturer and model number for the apparatus, without explaining what it did.

It's not that there's anything wrong with that-- when you're sticking together as many atoms as chemists deal with, you need to describe the arrangement in some detail; when you're a physicist working with single atoms (or maybe diatomic molecules), if you could buy an apparatus to do the experiment, it wouldn't be worth publishing-- but it's an amusing cultural difference between the fields.

(As for the original joke, the obvious question is "What do you call a person who buys an apparatus, and buys a sample, and does the experiment?" The flip answer is "An engineer.")


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HELLO
EXTEND
COME ON
JESUS
CHRIST

ok so does this extend

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