"You are not really a scientist. You are a biologist"

Random comments from an experimental particle physicist turned geneticist:1) Yes, physicists are that arrogant.2) To some extent the arrogance is well-founded. In my experience, the average physicist is smarter than the average biologist, and it is vastly easier (and more common) for a physicist to do biology than it is for a biologist to do physics.3) Mostly, though, physicists who feel this way are full of crap. Biology is science, and there is a lot more interesting science going on in biology than there is in physics these days. Biology tends to require different skill sets than physics does, and physicists who do well in biology are the ones who do not try to treat biology as if it were physics.