Physicists, Non Physical Topics, and Interdisciplinarity

TL;DR

This paper proposes redefining interdisciplinary physics as the work done by physicists using their methods across diverse topics, emphasizing a flexible 'cabinet of curiosities' model to foster new subfields.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for interdisciplinary physics centered on physicists' approach and a 'cabinet of curiosities' concept to encourage diverse and innovative research.

Findings

A new definition of interdisciplinary physics based on physicists' methods.

A proposed structure of a 'cabinet of curiosities' and an incubator for emerging subfields.

Illustration of the model through social physics example.

Abstract

Defining interdisciplinary physics today requires first a reformulation of what is physics today, which in turn calls for clarifying what makes a physicist. This assessment results from my forty year journey arguing and fighting to build sociophysics. My view on interdisciplinary physics has thus evolved jumping repeatedly to opposite directions before settling down to the following claim: today physics is what is done by physicists who handle a problem the "physicist's way". However the training of physicists should stay restricted to inert matter. Yet adding a focus on the universality of the physicist approach as a generic path to investigate a topic. Consequently, interdisciplinary physics should become a cabinet of curiosities including an incubator. The cabinet of curiosities would welcome all one shots papers related to any kind of object provided it is co-authored at least by one physicist. Otherwise the paper should uses explicitly technics from physics. In case a topic gets many papers, it would be moved to the incubator to foster the potential emergence of a new appropriate subfield of physics. A process illustrated by the subsection social physics in Frontiers in physics.