I guess “stamp collecting” means “finding rare things”? And “physics” is about learning about more complex rules of interaction?

I think that covers chemistry, as we already know the rules pretty well and are just looking for ways to get rare things. Particle physics too, we predict that things exist and many years later finally create (“collect”) them.

Ecology and Economics, we don’t know all the rules.

Maybe that’s a simpler summary: figuring out the rules vs applying the rules.

Dirty ver

Yeah, a friend of mine uses OTL as a “head-desk” emoticon and every time I’m just seeing letters and trying to expand the initialism.

It’s easier when it’s mixed or impossible punctuation, like O.O or T_T or things like that - signaling that “normal rules of letters combining into words are not valid here, look for a different pattern”