What The Ancient Greeks Knew About Atoms (or what is a discipline?)

Natural philosophy has its origins in Greece during the Archaic period, (650 BCE – 480 BCE), when Pre-Socratic philosophers like Thales rejected non-naturalistic explanations for natural phenomena and proclaimed that every event had a natural cause.^[13] They proposed ideas verified by reason and observation and many of their hypotheses proved successful in experiment,^[14] for example atomism.

-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physics#History

"Natural Philosophy" may have been the first Western word for what we would now call physics. Philosophers like Aristotle studied motion and matter alongside ethics and politics, going so far as to conceive of the atom centuries before experiments would confirm this concept. Physics had its origin with philosophy, as did many of the sciences.

Physics is an attempt to find the most fundamental descriptions of our universe. It takes us down to the level of atoms, then inside them, and even further still. By some happenstance of nature, physics has had great success using the tools of mathematics to explain and predict much of what we see in this world. We can mathematically relate the notion of electricity with that of light, describing the latter as an electromagnetic wave through empty space. But light is a particle! It is made up of tiny little light specks called photons. How can it be a wave? Such questions were the essence of 20th century physics. Physics strives to connect the language of mathematics with the essence of reality.

Hence I do not think that physics has any trouble being interdisciplinary within the natural sciences. We already collaborate with mathematicians, chemists, computer scientists, philosophers, biologists, engineers and plenty of others.

Past that point, it gets harder. Physicists seem to operate on a value system that is foreign and bizarre to social scientists. We have trouble making meaningful connections between social and physical reality. Another situation I have noticed is that our jargon is a prime target for confusion with that of other disciplines - it is easy to be confused with a statistician, engineer or computer scientist. Sometimes I am tempted to get one of these t-shirts :P

Physics is filled with theories. My experience so far has shown me that people from disciplines that are far from the natural sciences are hesitant to engage with mathematical theory, and physics is hardly easy for anyone. To quote Richard Feynman, one of the greats in this field, "I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics." A more contemporary, though less famous thinker remarks, "it is often stated that of all the theories proposed in this century, the silliest is quantum theory. In fact, some say that the only thing that quantum theory has going for it is that it is unquestionably correct."

So what's next? Can we bridge the gap? I think underlying it is a simpler question: what can we do together that will reward both sides?