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i'd like to really agree with rosemary on the concept that both of these articles made physics into a kind of club - both in the sense of a decadent priesthood and in the sense of an ethnograph-able (separate?) culture.  what's interesting to me is that as an insider, so to speak, as someone in the process of training and initiation, physics doesn't necessarily look like that.  and when i do see evidence of that "club" mentality, i can find parallels in other disciplines easily.  in particular, i remember flora mentioning people looking down on other people within the context of gender studies because they "hadn't read the right [or enough] literature."  so many of the things we've said in this class reinforce for me the stereotypes and misconceptions people have about science, and scientists.  i mean, i've never in my life heard a physicist say that physics is objective, but that's been brought up in nearly every reading and discussion (usually in the context of "physics presents itself as...") and particularly in this recent reading relating to fundamental "truth," religion and the search for a theory of everything.  i wonder if part of the problem is perspective - what we're doing, and what we think we're doing, may have little or nothing to do with what the public thinks we're doing.  now, obviously, this could be a good thing or a bad thing, or a little bit of both... but in either case the issue is really communication with the outside world.  should a physics research insitution have to tell the public everything it's doing, and why?  should bryn mawr have to tell me where every cent of my tuition is going, and why?  should the government have to account fully for every single decision it makes?  and go out of its way to explain its plans, hopes and expectations to a seriously uninformed public?  i don't know.