by Scarlett de Courcier

Created on: January 24, 2009

The terms 'social', 'physical' and 'sciences' are difficult enough to define in themselves, even without attempting to find similarities between the disciplines. Nonetheless, similarities do exist, and arguably the further into the study of the physical sciences one goes, the more links can be made with social science, and vise versa.

Physical sciences can be loosely defined as the three whose constituent parts can basically be boiled down to physics: biology, chemistry, and of course physics itself. 'Social sciences' refers probably to psychology, and perhaps to sociology; the latter of which is definitely social, but may not be a science, due to the lack of empirical data available. Nonetheless, for the purpose of this article, the 'sciences' shall be divided into the two groups mentioned above.

The scientific community is well aware of the connection between the social and physical sciences; indeed, if they were not, there would be hardly any reason to continue with certain areas of their disciplines. Yet the links between the two are becoming more and more prominent as science progresses. Let us take physics as an example. Perhaps at base the most obvious candidate to be termed a 'physical science', it was for a long time believed that physics had no real relation to the inner workings of the human mind; to life on a social level; indeed, to 'the human experience' as differentiated from that of any other animal. Within the past two hundred years, however, physics has become gradually more intertwined with its social neighbours, peering suspiciously out from behind the half-closed door of empiricism to regard the welcoming faces of psychology, sociology and their ilk.

How has this happened? The findings and intuitions of quantum physics have ridden roughshod across the homeland of science, leaving such dedicated pioneers as John Gribbin, Erwin Schroedinger, Michael Lockwood and Roger Penrose to follow behind, arranging the scattered debris into the correct categories. And this is where it becomes interesting, for much of the debris left over seemed to belong where much of science had not belonged for a very long time: in the piles of philosophy and psychology.

Roger Penrose, in his excellent work Shadows of the Mind, explains in comprehensible terms the problems quantum physics is posing for the classically accepted view of what the scientific community entails. In a manner explained in more detail elsewhere, he discusses the fact that taking a Goedelian approach

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