smart

Who's the Smartest of Them All?

A recent effort to settle the age-old question "Which scientific field has

the most intelligent people?" has obtained some very preliminary results.

Project Smartypants, initiated last December by "mini-AIR," the online

version of the Annals of Improbable Research, asked readers to rank

academic disciplines according to the intelligence of their members and to

comment on the cliché that "physicists are smarter than chemists, and

chemists are smarter than biologists."

Physicists won hands down. The tally of 46 respondents--a dozen of them in

physics-related fields--reveals that 40% rated physicists as the most

intelligent. Mathematicians (11% of the sample) were favored by 15%, while

chemists and biologists each captured 6% of the top votes. There was a

motley assortment of other nominations, including stockbrokers, school

custodians, and postmodern philosophers. At the other end of the spectrum,

political scientists, economists, and sociologists received votes as least

intelligent.

AIR didn't define "smart," leaving room for various interpretations. A

Swedish respondent contended that "smart people avoid complicated

problems"--which would knock most scientists out of the running. A Texas

pharmacology professor defined the smartest people as those who "go where

the most money can be made." He put biologists first and physicists last.

Others felt engineers had the most mental firepower. "Engineers have to be

smarter, because someone has to apply the abstract principles found by

chemists and physicists and do something useful with them," noted a

chemical engineer.

Critics were quick to identify flaws in the study, including the small and

physicist-loaded sample. And as one respondent pointed out, the central

question needed refinement: "Is it 'Which field has the most people with

intelligence?'--i.e., the largest quantity of nonmorons--or 'Which field

has people with the greatest intelligence?'--maybe one or two lights in an

otherwise dark area?"

AIR investigators promise to employ more rigorous polling techniques in the

future. Says AIR Editor Marc Abrahams: "Rocket scientists and brain

surgeons were apparently too smart to respond to our original inquiry."