[2011 'O' Level English Language Paper 1 Section 1 prompt.]
She was running away. What from, that, she would have to get back to you later -- there was too much adrenaline coursing through her veins, confounding her thoughts, like an overcast black cloud with few flashes of lightnings of recollections. She sensed the cool wetness of grass under her feet, the twinges of pain from the cuts and bruises on her limbs, metallic smell from slight lacerations near her thighs, chilly breeze coming from gaps through her torn skirt and blouse; all dampened from adrenalinic numbness. The undergrowth was thinning and she came upon a clearing; she picked up her pace even more, until the sky is covered again with lush green foliage. The open sky somehow instilled a deep fear inside her, as if she were a furry little rodent keeping out of the sight of the flying talons who rule the sky. Her body felt mechanical: her bare feet trod the muddy ground hard, her arms flailed with reckless rhythm, her breathing heavy and puffed; she was not in control of any of these -- her body had executed the self-preservation programme that seated her conscious mind in the backseat.
You could almost hear it. The collective sigh of chemists all over the world, I mean, over similar sentiments as above. Of course as a chemist-in-training I should say something in apologia. Though as soon as I said that, I realised that the epistemological perspective of the field is nowhere found in my training. So treat this piece as what I thought I knew about chemistry at the meta-knowledge level, and why I found the aforementioned comment distasteful, to say the least.
I will begin with definitions, like all good epistemological pieces should. To be sure, physics is the study of physical things and how they behave, in other words, the physical laws. Technically then, chemistry is certainly a subsidiary of physics, but so is biology, geology, climatology and every other subject studying the tangible, because the tangible obey physical laws. Such classification then becomes useless, the field too bloated, which defeats the purpose of classification in the first place.
As such, we must recognise the two kinds of classifications here: the technical one and the utilitarian one. So, an attempt to unify chemistry under the grand umbrella of physics is technically proper but not useful. Utilitarianism here is of course anthropocentric -- Man is the measure of all things, said Pythagoras. The study of behaviours of valence electrons has implications in the chemical industries -- from paints, fertilisers, cosmetics, foodstuff, to drugs -- that are paramount to our lives that they need a separate category. This is even truer for the engineering fields, the direct spawns of physics, that the industry would benefit from clear distinctions. As important is the utility to the academic learning. The massive amount of knowledge has to be compartmentalised -- the size of the field should be roughly learnable within a four-year bachelor's degree. Imagine if a physics degree also requires you to learn chemistry to the level of the current chemistry degree -- how long would that take, and how useful is that for the learner who doesn't intend to go to grad school? And the utility values to the industry and academia are intertwined. The training during the four-year bachelor's should be at least enough for the learner to have a basic grasp of the field to start out in the industry (or his curiosity piqued enough that he would choose to go to grad school, but that's another story).
Sure, the divisive line blurs when one talks about physical chemistry for example. Does thermodynamics belong to the realm of physics or chemistry? Sticking to utilitarian value, one should resist classification then, and embrace both labels, because, why not? The separate classification of chemistry should serve to make clear; when it does not serve this purpose and potentially misleads instead, then the classification has ceased to have any utility.
In a talk I attended where Aaron Ciechanover, 2004 Nobel laurate in Chemistry, was the speaker, someone, evidently an organic chemist grad student, asked about the role of synthetic chemist in increasingly biological approach in drug industry. He gently rebuked the questioner regarding the absurdity of such division. In short, he lamented the current state of affairs where science departments are so isolatedly fragmented they are not communicating and collaborating with each other. When I think of these things, strangely enough I am reminded of Victor Frankenstein, whom Shelley described as a 'natural philosopher' if my memory serves right, and his creature. That there was a time when the hard sciences are united on a front called natural philosophy, before it has inflated to the the sewing of appendages that barely fit each other, the chimeric monstrosity it is today.
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Recapitulation so far: It is of utility value to have chemistry as a separate field from physics. This argument may not apply to other fields, so I'm going to offer another argument that applies in all cases. First, if you haven't seen the xkcd's Purity spectrum, go see. Hoewever, as you might suspect, chemistry is not just applied physics, biology is not just applied chemistry and so on. You see, at some point, neuronal connections (biology), neurotransmitters (chemistry), and a bunch of other stuff, as a system, gains enough complexity to become your mind, your consciousness -- picture gestalt, that which the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. You can't go from physical laws to understanding schizophrenia because the interactions involved have become intricately, impossibly complex to unravel. Such property of complex systems is called emergence, and fields are systems of knowledge. Consequently, while you can say how pure your field is compared to to others, it doesn't make one field any more complex than the others, thus any more worthy of study compared to others.
Bottom line is: dividing sentiments are not useful. There is no point in arguing whose field is more significant. What the scientist must do is make distinctions when necessary and useful, and not make them when unnecessary and useless. Carry on that spark of lightning that keeps a burning fire inside Frankenstein's creature's heart; that keeps him alive, that leads him to search himself, that pushes him to wrestle with his creator, that makes sewn appendages move as one.