As the sixth of Dante's Seven Deadly Sins, envy is scarcely to be envied. Yet in the context of creativity, physics-envy as a special case has a more salubrious presence.
In the words of philosopher Richard Rorty, the term 'physics-envy' signifies an 'anxiety about whether one is sufficiently scientific'. It refers to the envy people in some disciplines manifest toward physics, perceived as the most perfect, most mature and most successful of all the sciences; and to the desire that their discipline should attain the same kind of perfection. The term, of course is a sly analogical allusion to a well-known Freudian concept.
In this talk I discuss physics-envy in certain domains of the creative tradition and its pitfalls and predilections as a creative drive.