Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting.

[Kajahtava]

A silly statement of Rutherford's indicative of the all-too common physicist's flaw of wholly unjustified arrogance.

The inability of physics to come up with any useful predictions within fields like biology or the social sciences (due to the mathematically unmanageable wealth of parameters involved) is a case in point.

And who cares, really, whether a star light-years away from us has a lot higher density than our own sun (and that we may predict&compute it)?

The activity to develop conceptual tools effective in the study of fields like biology or the social sciences is no less intellectually challenging than developing the mathematical tools usable in physics.
Ingenious experiments must be thought out to show this or that in biology, and Emile Durkheim's thoughtful analysis of the suicide phenomenon must be considered good research.

Aequating if some thing is a science to how useful it is, or how 'intellectually challenging' it is nonsensical. I daresay that chess is intellectually challenging, or that whiping your bum is useful, neither are sciences.

Science is the process of inferring truth via the scientific method, since physics stays the strictest to objectivity, falsifiability, lack of human interpretation and manipulation of data, surely at the least physics is the most scientific of the empirical sciences. That has nothing to do with use, and indeed, pure science, per definition is scientific research done only for knowledge without any practical use for it, at the point in time the research is done.

Physics without a single debate to it since Newton on is the most, if not the only empirical scientific discipline out there, because in physics, new theories are expected to default to the old theories under special circumstances. Relativistic mechanics approximates Newtonian mechanics under every day velocity, the standard model approximates special relativity under macroscopic scales.

Thereby, physics truly improves and becomes closer and closer to the truth and becomes more praecise, however chemistry and biology often contradict their old theories with new ones, to me, that may not happen, if a scientific method of deduction allows that, then I can no longer call it science, albeit practical, which is a completely different thing. Science is simply a methodology and if a new accepted theory outright contradicts an older one, than one of those per definition was not inferred and tested by the scientific method.

 

[flashprogram]

I would say that mathematics is more fundamental, and computer science is right along there. Physics may tell you how this reality works at a fundamental level, but if we look at complex systems or even consider that there may be more than just this reality, the truths obtained through mathematics and computer science could very well be more fundamental they can be theories about the nature of all possible conceivable states of existence.

Having the fundamental laws as they relate to say something like biology, is like having the assembly language instructions of a particular cpu and relating that to a complex program like say photoshop. The program may be composed of sequences of those simple instructions when you boil it all down, but it would be ridiculous to expect one to easily derive any of the infinity of possible programs from that. Another example would be deriving Hamlet or Moby Dick from an english dictionary and the rules of english grammar, obtaining this out of the infinite of possibilities allowed by the rules is preposterous .

In fact in more complex systems it is simply better to study the relationships between elements at various scales and elucidate how new properties emerge at different levels of organization. Some properties require higher level description to better understand what is going on, the concept of emergence.

 

[Descartz2000]

"Physics is the only real science. The rest are just stamp collecting."

-- Ernest Rutherford

How valid is this statement. I think it has a lot of validity considering the fact that you are learning the fundamental laws of the universe and nature. You are basically studying the "Mind Of God". Where as other sciences such as social science, geology, biology and even chemistry are more specific into detail that may be more mundane that what physics teaches. Physics seems to be the big picture of science, and thus its essence as well.

I think there is much to be gained from other sciences. They may not be as "hard" of science, but there is value there. For example, Bell's theorem can be resolved by addressing the issue of free-will. Libet and his studies and many more recent studies equate free-will to being an illusion. If true, there is no free will. But QM does not address free will, some have tried, but it takes another format of biology or neuroscience to do this.