An English English professor — I mean an Englishman who is also a professor of English — mocks the hard sciences to a mathematician:
A great poet is always timely. A great philosopher is an urgent need. There’s no rush for Isaac Newton. We were quite happy with Aristotle’s cosmos. Personally, I preferred it. Fifty-five crystal spheres geared to God’s crankshaft is my idea of a satisfying universe. I can’t think of anything more trivial than the speed of light. Quarks, quasars — big bangs, black holes — who gives a shit? How did you people con us out of all that status? All that money? And why are you so pleased with yourselves?
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
I’d push the lot of you over a cliff myself. Except the one in the wheelchair, I think I’d lose the sympathy vote before people had time to think it through.
(Tom Stoppard, Arcadia, Scene 5)
“Physicists themselves are partly to blame for this sad situation. Their shop talk sounds like advanced Greek, unless you are Greek or a physicist. When they are not talking to other physicists, physicists speak English. Ask them what they do, however, and they sound like the natives of Corfu again.”
[From Gary Zukav's The Dancing Wu Li Masters, of which this comment does not necessarily constitute a recommendation.]
(Actually, since Zukav was writing from an English-speaker’s POV, he got the “speak English” claim almost precisely backwards. Physicists currently use English (or possibly a Greek-lexified, English-based jargon) to speak among physicists, except in those circumstances in which all of the physicists present are fluent in something else. In the latter case, they speak somethingelse-glish/glais.)