(continued...)
When I wrote my little thing about plumbers, I was just answering Dinosaur's question about who is more objective than scientists.
I know, and my post about plumbers was very much tongue-in-cheek, as I hope you noticed. But there was a point in there. Anybody can be arrogant and protective of their own expertise, plumber or politician or scientist.
My answer was basically that anyone who works with their hands could reasonably be a contender. Machinists, mechanics, warehousemen, ditch diggers, bus drivers. They are in constant contact with the objective physical world and inject far less of themselves into their work product than scientists. They aren't always hypothesizing, theorizing, imagining and trying to spin up universal cosmic principles out of what they do. It's weird, but often when we talk about science, we aren't literally talking about the physical world at all, but are talking instead about products of the scientific imagination: fields, dark energy, cosmic strings, Schroedinger's equation... How much of science's theoretical language actually corresponds in the scientific-realist sense to real objectively existing being out there in the world?
A plumber is concerned primarily with things that exist on a human scale. But scientists often have to consider things that are not even directly observable with our ordinary senses - whether it be atoms or genes or black holes or bacteria. The scientist's aim is to understand the world at a more fundamental level, but necessarily at a level that is often removed from everyday observation. And why? So as to learn how better to control and predict our environment.
It is probably not an uncommon idea that scientists spend a lot of their time just "making stuff up". Cosmic strings and dark energy sound like bizarre sci-fi fantasies that somebody just dreamed up. But ultimately they come from observations that raise unsolved problems. Something needs an explanation. But that explanation can't be just a free-form fantasy. It has to
fit with everything we already know. So, a scientist's hypotheses are always constrained, both by the raw data and by accepted theories. Laymen may well wonder at some of the whimsical names used to stand in for a complex idea (e.g. "dark energy", "big bang", "epigenetics"). What they don't always realise is that these are, ultimately, just labels attached to a theory. Even a word like "electron" is shorthand for a theory.
When a plumber holds a length of plastic piping, is that something that is really "out there in the world"? Certainly, the plumber's perception is of a solid object with certain properties. The scientific model of the pipe is somewhat different. For example, 99% of the plastic making up the pipe is actually empty space, and the pipe itself is solid only in so far as its component atoms are bound together by invisible forces.
What's real - the plumber's solid pipe, or the scientist's collection of atoms? I say both are real, with the main difference being the level of accessibility of each model to ordinary human senses. The plumber no more knows the "real pipe" than the scientist does.
Who then is really more "objective" about that pipe? The plumber, who takes it at face value, or the scientist, who sees what the plumber sees
as well as knowing about the various theories that describe the pipe at a more fundamental level? Is it the person with
less knowledge who is more objective?
What's more, we don't have plumbing celebrities like Feynman, who is better known among the general public for his witty and breezy writing style than for his physics. We don't have plumbing demigods like Einstein, who is still avidly quoted today for his views on things like religion, a subject that he probably didn't know any more about than anyone else.
Celebrity in science is quite rare, but when it happens it can happen in a big way. I think there are no celebrity plumbers precisely because plumbing doesn't hold the same aura of mystery for the general public that science holds. Most of the general public today would never have heard the name "Feynman". Everybody has heard of Einstein, but very few can explain even what $$E=mc^2$$ means, even if it's the only "famous" equation they know. For most people, Feynman and Einstein are archetypes of "smart". They don't know what those men did, or very much about what they were like as people. But they see them as representative of what great scientists are like. Einstein is quoted for his views on religion in part because it is (somewhat inaccurately) assumed that smart in one field means generally smart - that smarts are transferable from one thing to another.
The other thing to say is that Einstein and Feynman are role models for many people who aspire to be scientists, just as Taylor Swift is a role model for aspiring pop stars. People admire and like to emulate others who have been successful. Also, Einstein, Feynman and Swift all achieved a level of fame, and lots of people think they want to be famous.
There aren't too many celebrity plumbers. Mostly, I think, this is because their skills are largely transferable. In most instances, one plumber is as good as another for getting the job done. Einstein, though, is arguably irreplaceable. Even Taylor Swift is, in some ways, unique. Fame tends to come because of some element or perception of uniqueness.