In astronomy there are theorists and observers. Theorists do scary things like path integrals and observers do tedious things like data reduction, and somehow the field has managed to inch forward over the centuries to advance our knowledge of the universe. At one point astronomers were often both, but these days that is rare.
This year, Cosmology on the Beach was populated by many non-astronomers and certainly many theorists, so that might be why the question, "You said ellipticals don't have disks; does that mean they don't have star formation?" was not too out of place. The theorist lecturer answered, basically, yes, and then went on to muse on why there is this difference between spirals and elliptical galaxies. It occurred to me that an observational astronomer might have went into some detail about what different galaxy surveys have found, examples of observed star formation in ellipticals, and the properties of both. By glossing over details and giving the simple answer (yes), the theorist's answer was perhaps less true than my hypothetical observer's answer. The real world is more complicated. But instead of detailed examples and caveats, the theorist's attempt to answer "why" was perhaps more meaningful.
Thus I am writing this instead of listening to discussion which has now moved on to the subject of inflation theories (both less true and less meaningful). I wonder if the statement: "Observers are concerned with what is true; theorists are concerned with what is meaningful" is either true or meaningful. Observers (and experimentalists) collect facts about the universe. Theorists try to put these facts together into a coherent whole and derive new facts. Obviously both would argue that they care about both what is true and what is meaningful, and they would be correct, but not in a meaningful way. ;-)
Most theories end up being falsified by observations, so I think it is easy to accept the first half; but what about meaning? Can meaning even exist without truth? I would say yes, but it is not obvious. I think meaning is really found in connections, processes, and dependencies, whereas facts are static. Facts are independent of other facts. Regular readers may not be surprised that I prefer change over stability and processes over products, and perhaps that is why I'm not an observer.
I think it's not much of a stretch to say that truth is stable, final, while meaning connects truths to each other and to people. Observations themselves lack meaning unless they say something about theories... so for example, observations of N stars and their positions, brightnesses, colors, etc. don't say anything meaningful about the universe until they are connected with a theory of star formation. On the other hand, observers collect beautiful truths that stand on their own while theorists only ever make models and attempt to describe reality with math. Observers touch reality itself, while theorists play around with representations of reality. Perhaps that's why I'm not a theorist either....
How much of this "theory vs. observation" divide is a result of personality differences, and how much is a result of the need to specialize? Theorists and Observers are both important and needed, and although both admit that the other has their uses, both have put themselves into a box of one or the other. Both make jokes at the others' expense: theorists aren't connected to the real world and observers fit lines through scatter plots. Sometimes I laugh at these and sometimes I find myself bothered by them. Can't we all just get along? Of course, whenever a joke is directed at me I can say "no, not an observer!" or "not a theorist!" And then I say "phenomenologist" and vanish in a puff of smoke.
But then I find myself in a puff of smoke! And I'm not even sure I can use the word "phenomenologist" legitimately. I simulate things and analyze the simulations, so I don't do scary integrals and I don't do tedious data reduction. I'm probably close enough to a theorist to be grouped with them, since basically my computer calculates the integrals for me. It turns out a lot of science can happen from inside puffs of smoke.
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