I find your finding of insight in this quote to say more about the
challenge of AI than the quote itself ;-).
First, the quote directly contradicts itself. The first paragraph says that physicists alone hand their hard problems to others. The second describes how the chemists, biologists, and psychologists all also hand their hard problems to others.
Second, it ignores how nearly all fields of human endeavor hand of various kinds of hard problems to other fields. Software engineers hand off many hard problems to the mathematicians, philosophers, artists, hardware engineers, and sometimes even to other software engineers in adjacent levels in the software stack ;-). Similar relationships exist between archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists, climatologists, meteorologists, and so on. It's easy to think of examples.
Geologists can't hand all of their hard problems off to climatologists, but physicists can't hand all of their hard problems off to chemists either.
And yet, somehow, humans are able to perceive meaning from quotes like this. Our ability to read a quote, ignore what it actually says and figure out what we think it was meant to say is truly stunning.
First, the quote directly contradicts itself. The first paragraph says that physicists alone hand their hard problems to others. The second describes how the chemists, biologists, and psychologists all also hand their hard problems to others.
Second, it ignores how nearly all fields of human endeavor hand of various kinds of hard problems to other fields. Software engineers hand off many hard problems to the mathematicians, philosophers, artists, hardware engineers, and sometimes even to other software engineers in adjacent levels in the software stack ;-). Similar relationships exist between archaeologists, anthropologists, paleontologists, geologists, climatologists, meteorologists, and so on. It's easy to think of examples.
Geologists can't hand all of their hard problems off to climatologists, but physicists can't hand all of their hard problems off to chemists either.
And yet, somehow, humans are able to perceive meaning from quotes like this. Our ability to read a quote, ignore what it actually says and figure out what we think it was meant to say is truly stunning.