As Freeman Dyson, a famous mathematical physicist said, physicists can be classified into two types—Birds and Frogs. The cloud birds with a wide field of vision, can insight into the seemingly different questions and thoughts of the inner link; However, the other kind of physicists pursue deep facts and ultimate theories, and solve specific problems like bottom hole frogs, although their vision is limited. Such classification method can be used widely in different fields as well.  

It is important to emphasize that it does not exist bird and frog who is better, for the development of science requires both depth and vastitude, two types of scientists are indispensable.    

There is no doubt that Newton, Einstein, Frank Yang and other scientific masters are the outstanding geniuses of bird gens, they are good at reveal inherent unity of the laws between different physical phenomena, and skilled in using exquisite form of mathematics to describe the profound physical innate character. A bird in the family of a typical example is the founder of quantum mechanics wave theory, schrodinger, a legendary Austrian theoretical physicist. Unusually, schrodinger introduced the magical mathematical imaginary number "i" into his equation, thus perfectly unified the wave and particle properties of atoms. The thesis published and at once fell swoop to the most important one of scientific papers in the 20th century. Schrodinger is extremely proud of his equation, even he hadn't imagined absolutely that there would be so many useful things come from his equation.

The cloud bird is matched by bottom hole frog. The physical nobel prize winner in 1999, Gerard Hooft, is such a frog, this Dutch physicist's many work, all have the characteristics of deeply thoughts, complex mathematical form and ordinary people is not easy to read.  

To sum up, frog undoubtedly is the first-class scientific genius as well as bird.

For most scientific workers, whatever you do, the cloud bird or the bottom hole frog actually is unattainable thing. In every field of science, it always have more "low birds" and "ground frogs", these ordinary sentient beings along with a small number of outstanding genius constitute the real and natural scientific ecological circle.

On June 23, 2013    In Wuhan.

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