Birds and Frogs in Physics

Chemist and writer Ashutosh Jogalekar borrows the title of his mentor Freeman Dyson's celebrated 2009 talk "Birds and Frogs" (about mathematicians) and asks the same question of physicists. Birds fly high and survey the whole landscape; frogs sit in the mud and study the local details. Through Newton, Einstein, Bohr, Feynman, and others, Jogalekar argues that physics has needed both temperaments at every major turn — and that the modern over-celebration of bird-style grand unification can obscure the slow frog-style work that actually makes progress.