The following cartoon recently appeared on my Facebook feed, courtesy of Beatrice the Biologist.
This provides a neat illustration of the difference between how a biologist approaches nature and how a physicist approaches nature. Here is perhaps the greatest astrophysicist of the twentieth century, Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, in his book “The Internal Constitution of the Stars” (1926, pg. 16).
We can imagine a physicist on a cloud-bound planet who has never heard tell of the stars calculating the ratio of radiation pressure to gas pressure for a series of globes of gas of various sizes, starting, say, with a globe of mass 10 gm., then 100 gm., 1000 gm., and so on, so that his nth globe contains 10n gm. Table 2 shows the more interesting part of his results.
The rest of the table would consist mainly of long strings of 9’s and 0’s. Just for the particular range of mass about the 33rd to 35th globes the table becomes interesting, and then lapses back into 9’s and 0’s again. Regarded as a tussle between matter and aether (gas pressure and radiation pressure) the contest is overwhelmingly one-sided except between Nos. 33-35, where we may expect something interesting to happen.
What “happens” is the stars.
We draw aside the veil of cloud beneath which our physicist has been working and let him look up at the sky. There he will find a thousand million globes of gas nearly all of mass between his 33rd and 35th globes — that is to say, between 1/2 and 50 times the sun’s mass. The lightest known star is about 3 x 1032 gm. and the heaviest about 2 x 1035 gm. The majority are between 1033 and 1034 gm. where the serious challenge of radiation pressure to compete with gas pressure is beginning.
Letters to Nature 