A commenter wrote that
My point was that not all Doctors of Philosophy are called physicists. This blog seems to make that claim.
This is good point and I understand that there is a confusion so I wanted to create this page so that I can explain my position regarding the status of physicists in society. Who are they? What do they do? Who do they work for? Are they scientists? Or are they builders of mass destruction weapons?
I welcome comments to improve this document.
Thank you
It is true that PhD is issued today in many fields as a license to practice but originally PhD was specific to philosophy. More generally, history suggests that “scribes” is a historical constant and it is the first professional class going back to the discovery of written word. Physicists are the modern representatives of the scribal class. The following paragraph is adapted from Wikipedia with my interpolations.
The doctorate started around 9th century in Arabian schools as a vehicle to grant and enforce teaching and legal monopolies to a professional class of scribes. During the Middle Ages European universities classified any theoretical topic outside of theology, medicine and law under the rubric of philosophy and eventually they extended the doctorate to Philosophy, i.e., they granted a protected monopoly on philosophy. This original group of philosophical doctors were the Peripatetic philosophers. Later they started to call themselves natural philosophers to indicate that they were the followers of the Newtonian school. In the 19th century, with the Industrial Revolution, when it was found that subjects studied by physicists such as electricity and electromagnetism had energy implications physicists got out of their walled garden schools and switched their allegiance from academic science to technology and from the church to states and the military. Physicists of today are the direct professional descendants of medieval Doctors of Philosophy. That’s why I use Doctors of Philosophy and physicists interchangeably.
This story is proved by the financial structure of physics. Physics research is paid by the U.S. Department of Energy, NASA, National Science Foundation (originally founded to fund military research) and the military and their corresponding entities in other nations. (I am not necessarily saying there is anything right or wrong with this structure.) These institutions pay physicists through academic institutions who employ them.
Previously physicists were independent contractors for the military and the states. For instance Galileo. But the academic topics that physicists studied as natural philosophy such as electricity and electromagnetism turned into technological gold when it was discovered that they can be used to build weapons. And since physicists owned these subjects they extended their monopoly from philosophy and from teaching to technology and weapons building.
