Physics Envy

Flamebait, aber schmunzeln musste ich trotzdem.

What went wrong with humanities academia? From my position, I can only attribute it to a severe and debilitating case of physics envy. Humanities academics no doubt feel awed and belittled by the success of their colleagues in science; and so, like desperate cargo cultists, they have mimicked the form and procedure of the sciences, without understanding that what is necessary in one field is entirely meaningless in the other.

They bandy about “theories”, which give their works an air of meticulousness and precision, but in truth these are poor parodies of scientific theories. A scientific theory is a model of reality, induced from precise and repeated observations of evidence, formally stated, testable, falsifiable, and with useful predictive power. A “literary theory” is just, like, your opinion, man. When you know the theory of gravity, you know not only why an object falls to the ground, but also how fast it will fall and how hard it will hit; and you know this for any object and any ground in the universe. When you know “reader-response theory”, you just know what some guy thinks about books.

— http://plover.net/~bonds/physicsenvy.html

Bring it on.