Physicists, non physical topics, and interdisciplinarity

Autor: Serge Galam
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2022
Předmět:
Zdroj: Frontiers in Physics, Vol 10 (2022)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 2296-424X
DOI: 10.3389/fphy.2022.986782
Popis: Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my 40-year journey arguing and fighting to build sociophysics. My view on interdisciplinary physics has thus evolved jumping repeatedly to opposite directions before settling down to the following claim: today physics is what is done by physicists who handle a problem the “physicist’s way”. However the training of physicists should stay restricted to inert matter. Yet adding a focus on the universality of the physicist approach as a generic path to investigate a topic. Consequently, interdisciplinary physics should become a cabinet of curiosities including an incubator. The cabinet of curiosities would welcome all one shots papers related to any kind of object provided it is co-authored at least by one physicist. Otherwise the paper should uses explicitly technics from physics. In case a topic gets many papers, it would be moved to the incubator to foster the potential emergence of a new appropriate subfield of physics. A process illustrated by the subsection social physics in Frontiers in physics.
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