Thanks. (Also to Cuchulainn.) I need to think if I'm bored by or with physics...It’s bored “with” it. But apart from that I tend to agree with the sentiments. I have written before that physicists should suffer from economics envy not the other way around.
Anyway, I haven't noticed any physics envy among economists or other social scientists. Maybe because I work with people who do something practical and not just fart in a stool at some uni. Majority of social scientists I've met have well-guided scientific mission and work ethos, and considerably higher research and personal culture than physicists.
The only thing to envy the physicists is the simplicity and impunity of their work:
- deductive logic with its beautiful completeness: the absence of evidence becomes the evidence of absence. One could think that it is a better way to prevent rather than facilitate the progress of knowledge. Unless physicists won't get paid if they don't find the evidence - then they will keep searching, even if 40 years, until right before losing funds they find an unbiased 5-sigma evidence. Or was that 6-zeta significance? Who cares. No one knows exactly what are sigma and zeta.
- nomology: there's one and only one truth (yes, it is still physics, not Quran), and it's always true, unless it's in a black hole... But it's true that it's not true in the black hole. And the truth is that a black hole could suck in the whole Earth!!! Economists can suck at most a nation into oblivion by e.g. incorrectly assuming how wrong they are in their beliefs about here and now. Point for physicists this time.
- ivory towers detached from the world and reality like millionaire's private islands. Social sciences train system thinking - raze the walls and the reality blows in their faces from every direction. Such sports are only for people with a healthy spine.
I could go on, but to be honest I forgot what was my point... A shower! Yes, I need to take a shower.