Birds and Frogs in Physics - 3 Quarks Daily<br>Skip to content

by Ashutosh Jogalekar<br>Isaac Newton- Bird KingI shamelessly borrow the title of this essay from my mentor and friend Freeman Dyson’s marvelous talk on birds and frogs in mathematics. Birds are thinkers who look at the big picture and survey the landscape from a great height. Frogs are thinkers who love playing around in the mud of specific problems, delighting in finding gems and then polishing them so that they become part of the superstructure that birds survey. Einstein was a bird, Hubble was a frog. Science needs both birds and frogs for its progress, but there are cases in which one kind of creature is more important than another.<br>Most of the great thinkers in physics of ancient times were birds. They went by the name of natural philosophers. The fact that they were birds speaks both to the raw state of scientific knowledge at that time and the attitude that these thinkers had toward what we call science, an attitude that we should resurrect. Aristotle, Plato, Newton and Kepler saw science as a seamless part of a worldview that included religion. Many of them were alchemists and astrologers. Unlike many scientists today, they saw no conflict between science and mysticism and believed both to be created by God for man to study. Newton was a supreme bird, seeing Nature as a book written by God, a puzzle whose solutions had room for both calculus and alchemy, both gravitation and an Arian rejection of the Holy Trinity. Newton kept his Arian convictions secret for fear of persecution, but there is no doubt in his own mind that they were as legitimate as his scientific inquiries. At the beginning of the third volume of his famous Principia, Newton said, “It remains that, from the same principles, I now demonstrate the system of the world”, leaving no doubt either about his ambition or his grand birdlike worldview.

Even before Newton, Francis Bacon who can rightly be called the father of the modern scientific method of fact-finding and theorizing was a superb frog. Bacon rejected the Aristotelian theorizing that had characterized much of the history of science before him and said, “All depends on keeping the eye fixed upon the facts of Nature, for God forbid that we may give out a dream of our own imagination for a pattern of the world.”

Bacon firmly believed that the way to know more about Nature is to go out there and seek facts. We can build theories only after we have enough facts, which is still the way science generally works. The contrast to Bacon was Descartes, a prominent bird who famously said, “I think, therefore I am”. Descartes put a premium on thought, Bacon on fact-finding. As the somewhat apocryphal story goes, Bacon met his end while investigating the effects of cold on a chicken, thus revealing the flip side of fact-finding. Experimenters have it hard.<br>Francis Bacon – Frog KingIt is interesting to ask if birds and frogs in physics can be broadly classified. The boundaries can be fluid, but generally speaking, Cartesian thinkers tend to be birds while Baconian doers tend to be frogs. This is partly because thinking about a broad landscape of ideas is easier than getting your hands dirty even on a single, well-crafted scientific experiment. Similarly, physicists who are unifiers tend to be birds, while physicists who are diversifiers tend to be frogs. One of the great and continuing themes in the history of physics is that of unifying different theories and different forces of nature. For instance it took a bevy of birds like Rudolf Clausius, Gustav Kirchhoff, Sadi Carnot, Lord Kelvin and Willard Gibbs to unify the phenomena of mechanics and heat, inaugurating the science of thermodynamics. Around the same time, the great James Clerk Maxwell was inaugurating the science of electromagnetism by unifying electricity and magnetism. Maxwell was building on the foundational work done by Michael Faraday who had proved that electric fields can generate magnetic fields and vice versa.<br>But the example of Faraday, Carnot and Gibbs raise the interesting possibility of a new creature – the frogbird. Frogbirds are an exotic and rare species who start out as frogs, but who through their persistent and creative frog-like explorations inevitably turn into birds. In one of the very few examples of an engineer making fundamental contributions to science, Carnot was trying to find out the maximum efficiency of heat engines when these investigations led him to a fundamental law of nature – the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Faraday was a modest experimenter who loved getting his hands dirty with string and sealing wax. His main goal was to do simple experiments which would help him understand phenomena like the electric decomposition of salts. This research philosophy had been inspired by his mentor Humphrey Davy who had investigated the effects of laughing gas and discovered many new elements in bursts of frog-hopping. But Faraday discovered much more...