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| Pathologists do much more than cut up your recently departed, despite what TV cop shows tell you |
If you have a deep “instinct” that ultimately Reality, so chaotic seeming today, will be revealed to be simple, stable, predictable, controllable you will find the end goal of particle physics-cosmology, The Theory of Everything, aligned to your instincts.
You will start with theory and then look for experiments to prove it : applications for your results will never really interest you, despite what you tell grant committees.
But if your instinct is that ultimately Reality will be revealed to be even more chaotic, complex, dynamic, unpredictable than it now seems, pathology and its sister sciences will be your natural home.
Your theories will emerge from long years of hands on clinical practise.For the clinician’s slightly cynical mantra is ‘it always turns out that every patient is at least slightly different, just enough to throw my bloody meds regime off !”
No successful clinician ever grows to believe that reality is simpler than it first appears: quite the reverse.....
My father (and his Dad before him) were NS pathologists. Both very intelligent, well-read, pursuers of excellence in medicine. My father was also a reader of the philosophy of science, some quantum physics, and other matters. He knew that things made a certain sense in medicine, but that it was not the final science, or an exact depiction of reality.
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