Mathematicians vs. Physicists II

"The domain of physics is no proper field for mathematical pastimes. The best security would be in giving a geometrical training to physicists, who need not then have recourse to mathematicians, whose tendency is to despise experimental science." (Auguste Comte, "The Positive Philosophy", 1830)

"So intimate is the union between Mathematics and Physics that probably by far the larger part of the accessions to our mathematical knowledge have been obtained by the efforts of mathematicians to solve the problems set to them by experiment, and to create for each successive class phenomena a new calculus or a new geometry, as the case might be, which might prove not wholly inadequate to the subtlety of nature. Sometimes the mathematician has been before the physicist, and it has happened that when some great and new question has occurred to the experimentalist or the observer, he has found in the armory of the mathematician the weapons which he needed ready made to his hand. But much oftener, the questions proposed by the physicist have transcended the utmost powers of the mathematics of the time, and a fresh mathematical creation has been needed to supply the logical instrument requisite to interpret the new enigma." (Henry J S Smith, Nature, Volume 8, 1873) 

"At the present time it is of course quite customary for physicists to trespass on chemical ground, for mathematicians to do excellent work in physics, and for physicists to develop new mathematical procedures […] Trespassing is one of the most successful techniques in science." (Wolfgang Köhler, "Dynamics in Psychology", 1940)

"It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her." (Steven Weinberg,"Lectures on the Applicability of Mathematics" , Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 1986) 

"Mathematician ought not to be for the physicist a simple provider of formulae."(Henri Poincaré, The Relations of Analysis and Mathematical Physics, Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, Volume 4 (6), 1896)

"Probably, what characterizes all scientists, whatever they may be, archivists, mathematicians, chemists, astronomists, physicists, is that they do not seek to reach a practical conclusion by their work." (Charles Richet, "The Natural History of a Savant", 1927)

"[...] the mathematical physicist [...] obtains much prestige from the physicists because they are impressed with the amount of mathematics he knows, and much prestige from the mathematicians, because they are impressed with the amount of physics he knows." (William F G Swann, "The Architecture of the Universe", 1934) 

"Mathematicians who build new spaces and physicists who find them in the universe can profit from the study of pictorial and architectural spaces conceived and built by men of art." (György Kepes, "The New Landscape In Art and Science", 1956)

"Physicists are more like avant-garde composers, willing to bend traditional rules and brush the edge of acceptability in the search for solutions. Mathematicians are more like classical composers, typically working within a much tighter framework, reluctant to go to the next step until all previous ones have been established with due rigor. Each approach has its advantages as well as drawbacks; each provides a unique outlet for creative discovery. Like modern and classical music, it’s not that one approach is right and the other wrong – the methods one chooses to use are largely a matter of taste and training." (Brian Greene, "The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory", 1999)

"Theoretical physicists are like pure mathematicians, in that they are often interested in the hypothetical behaviour of entirely imaginary objects, such as parallel universes, or particles traveling faster than light, whose actual existence is not being seriously proposed at all." (John Ziman," Real Science: What it Is, and what it Means", 2000)