Was that clear enough? This is a terrific article to give to someone who does not know what physics is, what it does, how it works, etc. It is about time something like this is written. It emphasizes something that I've been telling a lot of people, especially quacks, who think that one can simply "learn" one aspect of physics while ignoring others. In particular, pay attention to this passage:
Consider the case of Bose–Einstein condensates (figure 2), existing at the intersection of atomic, condensed matter, and statistical physics, belonging to all those fields and to none of them alone. In addition, BECs could not have been produced, let alone studied, without the tools of optical physics, without manipulating electric and magnetic fields, without understanding gas and fluid dynamics, or without innovations in low-temperature physics. The experts will no doubt tell me what else I failed to mention. The point is that BEC research depends critically on the synergistic entanglement of all these sometimes separate fields of study. Take the contributions of one away and the program to make BECs collapses. It's more than interdisciplinary physics coming together to solve a problem. It's a deep entanglement of fields that gives rise to something qualitatively different, the emergence of an entirely new field.
A terrific article.
Zz.
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