The Power of Naming
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[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]
Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.
① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)
② The quark: There has long been a disconnect between the public life of Gell‑Mann’s quark and its parallel life in the on‑going world of theory. Out in public, we see the quark ensconced in six of the 18 boxes of the Standard Model, as Up Down, Charm Strange, Truth Beauty. Meanwhile, back in the technical realm whence it came, it is ridiculed by some as emblematic of all that has gone wrong in physics, in both style and substance, post‑1970. (See Unzicker 2013, in Appendix A.)
It seems the quark has political worries, too, of late. Consider the book review found on pages 50‑51 in Physics Today, January 2022. In a show of solidarity with the book’s author, the reviewer laments the practice of (TW) calling quarks colored since “that word has a loaded, racialized meaning.” The reviewer informs us that in one’s native Turkish, the adjective renkli, “which literally means ‘colorful,’ is used to describe such particles,” and that’s nicer. The reviewer asserts that the individuals who coined the terminology were “surely aware” of its racial hurtfulness. Well, at least half the physicists I knew (growing up in Old Berkeley of the 1950s) were silly and whimsical, while the other half were withdrawn and erudite, unaware of the world. So this racial hurtfulness accusation does not ring true to me. It’s tantamount to saying, “Although I have the credentials to teach physics, I have never been in the room with real physicists. Still, I can intuit what they’re like.” Really? Let’s see how and why the colors made their debut. They were introduced in 1965 by 南部陽一郎 and 한무영, apparently not of the presumed Dead White Men stock. By introducing colors (red‑yellow‑blue, later changed to red‑blue‑green), Nambu and Han “provided an extra degree of freedom which one could use to antisymmetrise an otherwise symmetric quark wave‑function, and thus made it possible to reconcile the symmetry of the spatial wave‑functions of the low‑lying baryons with the overall antisymmetry required by the Exclusion Principle.” Right. And in their wildest dreams could they have foreseen that 57 years hence, their whimsied but apposite innovation would be publicly shamed by some for sneaking “loaded racialized” hurtfulness into the physics classroom?
③ cosmic-ray decay, and Millikan’s descent into madness: Physicists like to say that particles decay into one another. What this really means is that they are transformed into one another (but that’s awkward to say) or that they give birth to one another (but that doesn’t sound science‑y), hence the argot term, decay. Usually, this usage is a problem only for those of us outside the field. For example, one of us might wonder: “Why do physicists say that a neutron sitting in dumb isolation, with a lifespan of only 14 minutes, decays into a proton, electron and [anti]neutrino (n → p + e– + ῡe), when s/he knows that each of these three brand‑new particles will likely enjoy a lifetime that is eternal as they go on to perform useful ‘jobs’ all through the cosmos?”
“Well, it’s a bit of jargon, you see, a façon de parler. Don’t fret.”
But Millikan did fret. And that might make his case unique, for here we have a physics insider — Nobel laureate and long‑time head of Caltech, no less — flailing in the quicksand of his own field’s jargon, as he worried himself sick over the scrambled up technical meaning and Webster’s gloss of ‘decay,’ just as one of us might. Subsequent to his prize in 1923, the word decay was instrumental in causing him to suffer 30 years of derangement over the question of whether decay plays a role in cosmic‑ray showers (the name ‘cosmic ray’ itself having been his own coinage, by the way, in 1925). He claimed that cosmic rays had nothing to do with matter being destroyed; rather, they must be the “Birth Cries” of matter being created. (Sparks from God’s Workbench, if you will.) Yes, mad as a hatter, but his name emerges no worse for the wear. All chemistry and physics textbooks feature his exquisitely clever method of measuring the elementary charge, which he found, via his 1909‑1913 oil‑drop experiments, to be 1.592×10-19 coulombs — which is astonishingly close to today’s reference value. The textbook authors politely ignore (or know nothing of?) the thirty years of his life that followed the Nobel in 1923. All the way to his death in 1953, against ever‑mounting evidence to the contrary, he never loosed his grip on his Birth Cries rosary. Truly, as Chabrol once said, L’intelligence, elle, a ses limites tandis que la bêtise n’en a pas. (See notes on bêtise = ‘folly’ in Appendix A).
④ the Sinitic languages and “the imperceptible psychological pressure of ‘politicolinguistics’ ” to stick with ‘The Chinese language.’ The latter is a misnomer that needs to be replaced by ‘the Sinitic languages,’ a term that fits the geographic breadth and chronological depth of all the entities at play. Mair’s promotion of that term is very welcome to anyone who has approached, say, Mĭn 閩 or Wú 吳 close enough to note the wonderfully deep gorges that hold them both separate from MSM. (For those unfamiliar with these three languages, the sounds of Mĭn are earthy or chocolatey while the sounds of Wú (in certain topolects) seem to float like iridescent dust that was blown off a butterfly’s wing. Meanwhile, MSM evokes a Sunday school class conducted in an attic with no air conditioning.) Further food for thought: “[E]ven Mandarin includes within it an unspecified number of languages, very few of which have ever been reduced to writing, that are mutually unintelligible[!]”
So, with ‘the Sinitic languages’ and topolects, we have terms that are at once technical and ready to cross the threshold into the general population. Even eager to cross. But there has been resistance:
Chinese scholars have repeatedly and confidentially told me on many occasions that Hanyu — on purely linguistic grounds alone — really ought to be considered as a group (yŭzŭ 語組), but that there are ‘traditional’, ‘political’, ‘nationalistic’ and other factors that prevent them from declaring this publicly. These concerns may be temporarily unavoidable inside China, but it is regrettable that they are also still being purveyed in purportedly authoritative treatments of language intended for external consumption.
That was written in 1991. Are the political and scholarly landscapes much different now, in 2025? Let’s see in the LL comments.
⑤ ‘observation of chirality’ contrasted with ‘violation of a symmetry’: In this final section, in addition to deciphering some technical terms I will also challenge how those terms were employed to report the results of an experiment that was designed and conducted in 1957‑1958 by Chien‑Shiung Wu (Wú Jiànxióng 吳健雄) and her NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) team. First, here is a commonsense reaction to her experiment: Her team obtained the following positive result: They demonstrated that it is not just certain local molecules that possess chirality but the Universe itself has chirality in some areas, at least in its mode of birthing electrons and antineutrinos. But in the argot of the physics establishment, the Wu experiment is described exclusively as something negative. Her experiment had uncovered an unwanted violation, a nonobservation of parity symmetry (which latter is something held sacred by the Establishment). Parity symmetry then had to be rescued and made safe from this apparent violation. Two decades of fancy accounting tricks put the issue to bed.
But, as an outsider, I feel compelled to ask: just how sacred is this thing called parity symmetry? Here we need to add some context: There are two very different kinds of symmetries in particle physics, the continuous symmetries, which are those of Emmy Noether (so I call them Noetherian), and the discrete symmetries, which I call non‑Noetherian. Now the one that was violated by the Wu experiment was parity symmetry, which is one of the discrete or non‑Noetherian symmetries. As such, parity symmetry is, in my view, only wannabe sacred, not diamond‑hard sacred by virtue of Noether genealogy. Or, look at the story in this most straightforward manner: If the Universe tells earthlings that their parity symmetry has been “violated,” then so be it; one should not spend time arguing with the Universe to say, “No, Universe, our parity symmetry is sacred. On this one, we’re right and you’re wrong.”
Not by design but as a side‑effect, the campaign to save parity symmetry caused the name 吳健雄 to recede little by little into the mists of history. Someday that name will be moved back into the limelight where it belongs, but for now it remains stuck in the ghetto‑like region of Women‑Scientists of Note, ancillary to theorists T.D. Lee 李政道 and C.N. Yang 楊振寧, who got the Nobel for conjuring the slight possibility of the chirality that Wu’s team demonstrated.
Appendix A: Sources and Notes
① information theory: See Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948, second paragraph: “These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem” (emphasis added). The journalists’ neglect of this ‘no‑semantics!’ warning is not the only problem. The jargon in section 6 is a never-ending source of confusion. There, Shannon uses the term information source but this does not denote actual information; rather, it is shop‑talk for: the lexicon in question and what degree of encoding‑richness it will require of us.
In 1957, Leonard Meyer wrote “Meaning in Music and Information Theory” (J. of Aesthetics and Art Criticism), the sort of intellectual showpiece that makes some people roll their eyes at the Liberal Arts generally. Fortunately, by 1967 he had paid his dues to the Shannon zeitgeist and now wrote an extremely valuable book in which he peered far into the future and predicted accurately the state of the arts today. (But the 1967 book begins with a reprint of 1957…)
The data/information vocabulary problem. L. Susskind, S. Lloyd et al. “The Physics of Information: From Entanglement to Black Holes,” at Perimeter Institute, 12‑5‑07, @1:15:28‑1:15:53, in responding to an audience member who points out that a bath’s temperature is data while its being ‘hot’ is information, Susskind becomes defensive about his entropy analogy on the whiteboard and provides this nonresponse: “Well [we physicists] think of data and information as being largely the same thing.”
Hossenfelder, “The Black Hole Information Loss Problem [BHILP] is Unsolved. And unsolvable.” Youtube, 11-18-2020, ID mqLM3JYUByM. @3:57 “[The BHILP] has actually nothing to do with information [rather, with the breakdown of our time‑reversal assumption, which would play out in the realm of data].”
Toward an actual Theory of Information: For a glimpse of how challenging the task would be, see The Chemistry Redemption (2010), Appendix E (pp. 299‑384) which outlines some of the desiderata for a true Theory of Information. (By the way, the feeding‑frenzy of Big Data Analytics is only tangentially related to all of this. A drop in the bucket.)
② The quark. For a different perspective on the Standard Model, see Unzicker, The Higgs Fake (2013) pp. 86, 89, and 104, where he eviscerates Gell‑Mann’s quark and Eightfold Way.
As for color, that was introduced in 1965 by 南部陽一郎 (Yoichiro Nambu, 1921‑2015) and
한무영 (Moo‑Young Han, 1934‑2016):
Sources: O. W. Greenberg, “The Origin of Quark Color,” Physics Today, January 2015, pp. 33‑37. Pickering, Constructing Quarks (1984), pp. 215-224, especially pp. 216‑219.
More about renkli: ‘colorful quark’ = renkli kuark, but ‘colored quark’ likewise = renkli kuark. And if we turn it around, renkli kuark translates only to ‘colored quark,’ not to the desired phrase, ‘colorful quark.’ Meanwhile, rengarenk actually does mean ‘colorful,’ so (if I cared) I would vote for rengarenk kuarklar to express ‘colorful quarks.’ Sources: dictionary.cambridge.org/us/translate; tureng.com/en/english-turkish; Google Translate. Meanwhile, what one should be concerned with (instead friendly Turkish) is the semantics of it all: quarks are not colorful; they are colored (one of three colors, depending on context). This is the overarching semantic reality of the situation, and it is nonnegotiable.
③ cosmic‑ray decay: “There were two ways [the ultra‑high energy of cosmic rays might come about]: either heavy atoms were decaying and releasing protons and electrons as they transformed into lighter elements, or light atoms were fusing with other light atoms to form heavier elements, releasing gamma radiation as they did so. In other words, only two things would produce such energetic rays: the decay of matter or the creation of it. Millikan was religiously committed to the latter view” [i.e., the cosmic rays must be made of photons, not protons]. Monk, Robert Oppenheimer (2012) p. 185, emphasis added. Another account of Millikan’s descent into madness is found in Crease/Mann, The Second Creation (1996), pp. 150‑155; theirs is brutal. For an account that seems to read sympathetically to Millikan (though not really), see Peter Galison’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “How Experiments End […],” Harvard University 1983, Chapter III, pp. 119‑207.
For the history of an event called ‘decay’ being recognized, after three decades, as particle creation (by Fermi, in 1934), see Ford, The World of Elementary Particles ( 1963), p. 8. See also Sutton, Spaceship Neutrino (1992), pp. 25 and 28: “Dmitrij Iwanenko […] commented that ‘the expulsion of a beta electron [is] like the birth of a new particle’.”
Millikan’s oil‑drop experiment: For a glimpse of its difficult nature,
see Fishbane et al. Physics for Scientists and Engineers (1993), II:697‑698, problem 53:
The charge is given by q = {[18p (v0–v1)]/E}√v0h3/2rgù
This equation is summarized in Giancoli, Physics (2005), II:756, as: q = (mdrg)/E.
Chabrol. Asked why so many of his films feature unpleasant people doing foolish things, Chabrol once quipped, “Intelligence has its limits but folly has none.” Or, in the original: L’intelligence, elle, a ses limites tandis que la bêtise n’en a pas. (In English, his word bêtise is usually rendered incorrectly as stupidity, which is the first dictionary gloss. In this context, bêtise must be rendered as folly, which is another one of its dictionary definitions. Otherwise, the saying would be a bore and would have long since fallen into oblivion: It’s precisely its focus on folly, not stupidity, that makes it shine.)
Some expected particle lifespans that one might well call eternal: 6.6×1028 years for the electron (now trending as “66,000 yottayears”); 6.6×1033 years for the proton. And so on.
④ the Sinitic languages as replacement for the misnomer ‘the Chinese language’:
see Mair, “The Classification of Sinitic Languages: What is ‘Chinese’?” on Semantic Scholar (2013). See also LL 1211, “Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages,” which references Sino‑Platonic Papers 29 (1991). In this order, I quote passages from SPP 29: p. 26n26 (for politicolinguistics); p. 18n4 (for “even Mandarin…”); p. 10 (full paragraph about yŭzŭ 語組).
⑤ chirality vs. symmetry. The process in question here is closely related to n → p + e– + ῡe for an isolated neutron, as seen in ③ above, now with the neutron, n, inside a cobalt nucleus which turns into a nickel nucleus when n becomes p: 27Co60 → 28Ni60 + e– + ῡe. After Sutton 1992, pp. 46‑49. Ford 1963, pp. 224‑227.
As for the reported chirality: That can be described in terms of electrons emerging preferentially from the notional “South Poles” of the cobalt nuclei instead of randomly from either “Pole.” (This is the short version, sans spin and mirrors.)
Example of the accounting method used to bury Wu’s “violation of parity”: Let’s say the goal is for all nations to maintain a Flat Profile, since this fosters world peace. Problem: the US is known to have stolen land from the Native Americans; not a good look. Solution: Note that the US also went to the moon, which is something positive. Now, when we add Plus One to Minus One the sum is Zero. Thus, the US is shown scientifically to have the desired Flat Profile, which fosters world peace. “Nothing to see here.”
Goldberg, The Universe in the Rearview Mirror (2014) pp. 295‑296: discrete symmetries and continuous [Noetherian] symmetries.
Wu, C.S., Ambler, E., Hayward, R., Hoppes, D., Hudson, R. (1957). “Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay,” Phys. Rev. 105, 1413‑1415.
Selected readings
- "Pablumese" (3/22/23)
- "The mind of artificial intelligence" (3/22/23)
- "Style? Stance? What?" (10/27/18)
- "'Neutrino Evidence Revisited (AI Debates)" | Is Mozart's K297b authentic?'" (11/13/24)
- "ChatGPT: Theme and Variations" (2/21/23)
- "Tang (618-907) poetry in Min pronunciation, part 2" (11/29/21)
Philip Taylor said,
February 4, 2025 @ 11:57 am
“ What's in a name? That which we call a roſe, By any other name would ſmell as ſweet. ” — Shakespeare, W (circa 1597).
Student said,
February 4, 2025 @ 1:31 pm
This linguistic pet-peeve post was a rant that should have been written more concisely. I'll try to avoid this in my reply.
The author Conan Boyce is correct that some of name choices are bad. However, why he would prefer eponyms like "Noetherian" over neologisms like "continuasymmetric" is lost to me, and weakens the credence he establishes by his correct points.
I was especially pleased he first criticized "information theory". In my schooling "data" and "information" were explicitly taught as synonyms, to my chagrin. "data", in my mind meaning "representations of something, representata", is not a synonym of "information", which can either mean "telling" or "informativeness". Most frustrating of all is the fact Shannon's "information" measure is just a measure of distinguishability between referents in a group by how many differences (represented as yes-no questions) it takes to distinguish one thing from another.
In principle, I agree with "chirality observation" over "symmetry violation"- but I don't know the context to fairly judge its use. To me this was the most agreeable point after information theory.
Physicists, mathematicians, and computer scientists are known for their whimsical namings, which when the names are misnomers I have always disliked. Physics's "color charge" is my bane- if only one could go back and remove every mention of color from the terminology. The phenomenon is analogous to macroscopic color mixing, but the fact that the phenomenon involves no color means it is a misnomer. Ditto the esoteric names for kinds of quarks. I dislike the whimsical name of "flavor" for these kinds. I'm glad the author Conan Boyce agrees.
I'm not sure how I feel about "decay"- decay traditionally means biological decomposition. The fact it is used in physics for the splitting of a whole into separate constituent parts seems to show it is being used as a general synonym of "decomposition". Technically this makes it a misnomer, but it seems small compared to the aforementioned misnomers.
I was confused why the author included the apt "sinolect" terminology of Victor Mair, in what I thought was just a misnomer post. I'm glad the author and I prefer this terminology.
Why just five terms to rant about? If one was to rant longer, I'd've recommended mathematical terminology, especially metaphoric extensions of geometric word meanings like sample space (possibility + -age (or some other collective suffix) would better communicate this), the use of ambiguous letter-logographs now distinguished only by typography (serif, sans-serif, blackletter, chalkboard capitals, et cetera), and horrible acronyms which should have been replaced by clear terms, like ANOVA, which should just be called "variance analysis".
Over the past few months I have prepared a whole document about the need for English neologisms to replace unclear terminology like those aforementioned. When I finish it, let the author Conan Boyce and I compare notes and see what is left to say.
David Marjanović said,
February 4, 2025 @ 4:35 pm
Half-life.
There are theories that predict protons decay into a neutral pion and a positron; the lowest possible half-life that hasn't been contradicted by observation is 6.6×10³³ years. Are there now theories that predict electrons decay? Last time I read up on this (20 to 30 years ago…), it was taken for granted that electrons are eternal if they're left alone.
I don't now if these topolects are mutually intelligible or anything*, but to the best of my knowledge the group is defined only by the absence of the innovations the neighbors have. There are plenty of very interesting innovations within the group, but apparently none shared by the supposed whole.
* Who am I kidding. Famously, nothing is mutually intelligible with what they speak in Wēnzhōu and rue Belleville in Paris (where I got to hear it… all I can say is it's recognizable as Sinitic).
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Three times you said this, for no apparent reason; and yet, in the very first line of the OP, it says the name is Conal with an L.
Jerry Packard said,
February 4, 2025 @ 5:10 pm
@Student
Why pick on ANOVA? It’s much less of a mouthful (3 syllables) than ‘variance analysis’ (7 syllables).
Student said,
February 4, 2025 @ 5:54 pm
@Jerry Packard
Because ANOVA is an abbrievation of "analysis of variance" (8 syllables). Abbrievations, unless they are nativized like "laser", can't derive new words of different grammatical function. ANOVA-ic is not a word an English, but " variance analytic" is. ANOVA's meaning is not apparent in its abbreviated form, while the unabbreviated "variance analysis" is. "Analysis of variance" was too long to write in full, but "variance analysis" is short enough (more so in writing than speech) to remain unabbreviated.
Student said,
February 4, 2025 @ 6:02 pm
@David Marjanović
Conal Boyce indeed! Thanks for the correction! I could have sworn I checked his name twice.
I restate author names while note taking, but forgot to remove them in my comment. I agree, his full name's thrice mention was excessive.
Matt McIrvin said,
February 4, 2025 @ 6:16 pm
"Decay" here was inherited from "radioactive decay" in nuclear physics, since it's an analogous process. "Decay" in physics is distinct from other types of transformation in that it tends to be thermodynamically irreversible and happens spontaneously; that's why it's not just referred to as transformation, which is a more general term.
"Symmetry" is another case where there's a more general term being applied: parity symmetry is just one one of many types of symmetry (rotational symmetry, translational symmetry, gauge symmetry) that may or may not apply to a given physical interaction, and "violation" is when such a symmetry doesn't apply. There's no particular implication of sacredness, though in the case of parity, it's a symmetry that does apply for electromagnetic, gravitational and strong nuclear interactions, so for something to be chiral instead was a bit of a surprise.
Student said,
February 4, 2025 @ 6:19 pm
@Jerry Packard
Correction: "variance analytic" is not a single word; my intent was that "variance analytiic" can be used attributively outside of compound nouns, unlike ANOVA, which can only be used attributively within compound nouns. Since this is a linguistics blog, I felt remiss to not correct this. Apologies if this is still technically incorrect, I hadn't the time to check Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language to vindicate myself.
@David Marjanović
You corrected the author's "lifespan" with "half-life". In the spirit of the post, might we instead consider " halving time", since it is not the duration of a life nor the duration of an object but the duration a quantity takes to halve? I half-jest.
Jerry Packard said,
February 4, 2025 @ 6:50 pm
@Student
ANOVA and variance analysis are not equivalent; the ANOVA is a specific type of variance analysis procedure – Student’s t is a form of variance analysis but it is not an ANOVA. There are many stat tests that analyze variance that are not ANOVAs. ANOVA is also conveniently productive (MANOVA, ANCOVA, MANCOVA, etc.). The same applies to attributive modification. That is, ‘variance analytic’ may, but need not, refer to the variance specifically derived via ANOVA.
Yves Rehbein said,
February 4, 2025 @ 7:03 pm
@Student
Etymologically, de- is one of those prepositions, a spatial metaphor in terms of Lackoff, but cay is a meaningless cranberry morpheme and I guess based on German Zer-fall it came through French from Latin cado "fall", incidentally cognate with Zufall "coincidence" (probably). The normal distribution of – random – half-time decay naturally goes down. The ballistic parable is a standard example in diagramming, i.e. a projectile falls to the ground, therefore fall (down) is a justified metaphor. The prefixes merely serve as intensives.
How somebody whose greatest contribution to science concerns a physical constant would fret at the idea of randomness is not a problem of lexical semantics except in a broad sense of linguistic relativity. The semantics of the physical theory are a different matter. How different I can not say.
katarina said,
February 4, 2025 @ 9:41 pm
@Student
The post by Conal Boyce was not a rant but a delightful, witty, essay.
I shall share it with a friend, an elementary particle physicist who taught physics at Oxford University for thirty-five years. Thank you, Conal.
Sorry to hear about the fate of Prof. Chien‑Shiung Wu. She was my late husband's dissertation director at Columbia.
Jon said,
February 5, 2025 @ 2:22 am
When I started life as a physicist more than 50 years ago, the elements resulting from alpha or beta decay of elements such as uranium were referred to as daughters.
Then, because of perceived sexism or anthropomorphism they became progeny. But progeny implies life, and it is awkward because you can't have 'a progeny'.
So they became decay products – which is a wider term, as it includes the other particles resulting from the decay. Decay is an odd term, as it implies rot, rather than explosive disintegration. But still, you get used to it, and you have work to do.
AntC said,
February 5, 2025 @ 4:25 am
Since this is _Language_ Log, I would have nominated (ha!) what I think of as one of the most misleading cross-discipline terminological transplants: Chomsky as music theorist. Manages to subtract insight from both fields.
bks said,
February 5, 2025 @ 7:33 am
If only electrons had been named positive, rather than negative, electrical explanations would be so much simpler. Likewise, if entropy increased as order increased, thermodynamics would not have driven Boltzmann to suicide. Next time.
Jerry Packard said,
February 5, 2025 @ 4:19 pm
@AntC
I heartily recommend ‘A Generative Theory of Tonal Music’ by Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff.
Michael Vnuk said,
February 5, 2025 @ 5:00 pm
Conal Boyce starts his article with: ‘Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public:’ Although ‘the public’ is mentioned prominently, I don’t think that many terms he mentioned are used by the public or even needed by the public. Hence, the problems he claims are, it seems to me, just internal problems of particular fields or particular persons.
‘Information’ v ‘data’ is probably a worthwhile distinction to make, but I’m not going to fret about what Boyce frets about, that misuse had led ‘astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole.’ That was Boyce’s final point (apart from his bracketed theorising about the Theory of Information).
Colour in quarks is something I’ve never heard discussed in public, although, of course, I’m only one data point, so my information might be irrelevant. Notably, Boyce only provides one data point for his reference to ‘colour’ being a problematic term, so I’ll await more data before I decide how significant is Boyce’s observation.
According to Boyce, Millikan had problems with the word ‘decay’. How does this affect the public?
‘Sinitic languages’ v ‘the Chinese language’ seems to be the strongest candidate here to be an actual issue, as mischaracterisation of the languages as one leads to numerous cultural, social and political problems. But I have come to this conclusion guided more by the explanatory posts of Victor Mair rather than by Boyce’s description of some of the languages (‘chocolatey’, ‘iridescent’, ‘Sunday school class’).
‘Chirality’ v ‘symmetry’ is again, in my opinion, irrelevant to the public.
I have worked as an editor, so I do appreciate the importance of the right word at the right time. However, most of these words have no effect on the public and the general lack of evidence presented by Boyce seems to confirm my assessment.
Haamu said,
February 5, 2025 @ 9:43 pm
Conal, I'm curious why you've chosen to mischaracterize the facts around Shannon's use or non-use of the term information. It was not introduced by journalists, but was in fact used 62 times by Shannon himself in the paper in question. And it was a term and concept already well-established by Ralph Hartley in his 1928 paper, "Transmission of Information," which was the true birth of the field. Shannon cited Hartley on his first page, second footnote.
You write, "In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly" (emphasis yours). I can only take "accordingly" to mean that the portions of that phrase you emphasize, including, especially, "data," were part of his title. But you know this is not true. You know it because you manage to cite the title correctly in your appendix. (Well, almost correctly. The first word of the title was "A" in 1948 and only became "The" when it was republished in book form the following year.)
Neither Hartley nor Shannon uses the term data at all, other than Shannon using it 3 times in one short passage about error "correction data." Instead, both Hartley and Shannon speak in terms of symbols where we would today talk about data. I like their choice of that term and think it actually brings some clarity to the distinction with information. The symbols (or data) are the physical artifacts that carry (or, to share Shannon's concern, attempt to carry) a message. The Hartley/Shannon concept of "information," on the other hand, is a mathematical measurement of (I won't do this justice) the capacity to distinguish among different possible messages. Whether you want to appreciate it or not, the Information Theory that came along with that concept was one of the towering achievements of the 20th Century and made possible many of the technological advances we enjoy (or suffer with, such as the ability to be lectured at by a stranger on a blog) today.
Yes, data and information have become confounded over the last 3/4 of a century, but that did not start with Shannon.
AntC said,
February 5, 2025 @ 11:52 pm
@Jerry P I heartily recommend …
As in: for a hearty laugh-out-loud? At times like this I miss the biting wit of a former denizen who not only has a thorough grasp of structural formalism but also actual experience as a musical performer/knows music from the inside.
The trouble is, I'm not sure L & J have enough self-awareness to intend this as a spoof. Furthermore there are some follow-on critiques that seem to take it seriously. (Why am I even surprised? People take Chomsky's recent more-and-more abstruse theorizing seriously; Chomsky who noone could accuse of self-awareness.)
Bernstein great conductor, sensitive accompanist, versatile composer, seemingly unable to verbalize _about_ his competencies. I'm reminded of E.B. White and George Orwell's inability to reflect on the tools of their trade.
Peter Grubtal said,
February 6, 2025 @ 1:36 am
AntC
George Orwell unreflective about the tools of his trade?
The notorious "Politics and the English Language" is surely a major reflection, quite apart from much of the content of "1984".
Or do you mean physical tools: pencils, typewriters?
Gokul Madhavan said,
February 6, 2025 @ 6:18 am
This guest post and the spirited discussion it has generated remind me of an old saw from the world of programming: There are only two hard problems in computer science: cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-1 errors. (Emphasis mine.)
I couldn’t find a confirmed original source but this Twitter link is a reasonable terminus ante quem.
Jerry Packard said,
February 6, 2025 @ 7:25 am
@AntC
No, not laughable, but serious scholarship. Even a brief glance at it reveals its scholarly merit.
Philip Taylor said,
February 6, 2025 @ 11:54 am
A full PDF thereof may be found online via here.
Nat J said,
February 6, 2025 @ 4:30 pm
I can't speak for AntC but I'm fairly confident that they're referring to Orwell's ignorance about grammatical matters as documented in numerous posts on this blog. If you search "Orwell" you can find posts, from the expert linguists here, describing "Politics and the English Language" as "stupid", "shit", and a "a beautifully written language crime". I think Orwell is fantastic, but I think it's fair to say that his (attempted?) reflections are something of a failure.
Nat J said,
February 6, 2025 @ 4:51 pm
As for symmetries and symmetry breaking, it's perfectly appropriate to call things symmetric when they don't have chirality, and when you find symmetric laws or patterns of behavior in the vast majority of contexts, I think it's extremely natural to say that the chiral exception "breaks the (near) symmetry".
Maybe also worth noting that rotations are continuous symmetries, reflections are discrete symmetries, but you can produce any rotation out of two reflections. Discrete and continuous symmetries really are in the same category of concept. It's not an accident that they're both "symmetries".
David Marjanović said,
February 6, 2025 @ 6:56 pm
German Halbwertszeit already does this, except I'm not sure what Wert "worth, value" is doing in there… though Halbzeit is the pause in the middle of a soccer game.
Zerfall has been mentioned; it's used for biological and radioactive decay alike because zerfallen quite literally means "fall apart".
AntC said,
February 6, 2025 @ 8:34 pm
search "Orwell" you can find posts, from the expert linguists here, …
Thank you @Nat J. Indeed.
Peter Grubtal said,
February 7, 2025 @ 3:33 am
AntC Nat J
well, Orwell might have got it wrong according to one school of thought, but not unreflectedly wrong.
Matt McIrvin said,
February 7, 2025 @ 8:16 am
To complicate the "chirality" vs. "parity violation" talk, there's also such a thing as "chiral symmetry" in particle physics, which is different from parity symmetry: with a chiral symmetry, a physical interaction is invariant even when some transformation operates in separate and independent ways on the "left-handed" and "right-handed" versions of a particle.
And then there are "chiral anomalies" in which a theory appears at first glance to possess a chiral symmetry, but in fact, higher-order quantum corrections cause this not to be the case.
In some situations, this can cause the theory to become internally inconsistent, unless the menu of particles in it is carefully chosen to make the chiral anomalies in the quantum corrections cancel out. And then this fact can be used to… not exactly explain, but at least justify, why the specific fundamental particles that actually exist do exist.
AntC said,
February 7, 2025 @ 8:43 am
L & J (obliquely) previously on LLog.
Matt McIrvin said,
February 7, 2025 @ 11:59 am
…Also, for the record, while many may object to the whimsicality of the word "quark", skepticism of the existence of quarks themselves is really not mainstream physics any more; there are too many phenomena that can only satisfactorily be explained that way–in particular, high-energy collisions with the kinds of particles said to be made of quarks show hallmarks of these particles having small constituents consistent with quarks, much like Rutherford's experiment showed that the atom had a small hard nucleus.
In the regime of these collisions, theory predicts that the quarks act almost as if they were free particles, so they're easier to make out–somewhat in the manner that, when analyzing a car crash, you don't have to consider the cars' gravitational binding to the Sun–and this seems to be borne out.
Chris Barts said,
February 7, 2025 @ 10:55 pm
Aside from the fact information theory is both very real and very useful, the quarks of the third generation are now called Top and Bottom, not Truth and Beauty.
Conal Boyce said,
February 8, 2025 @ 9:22 pm
Thank you katarina for highlighting the C.S. Wu story. Please do share!
As for the word 'information,' it is interesting to see how some still resist the idea that its occurrence in Shannon is always jargon, never once the word known to the general reader. Shannon himself warns against the misunderstanding on the first page of his 1948 paper:
"These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem."
One year later, Weaver spells it out for the general reader: "The word 'information,' in this [data-communication theory of Shannon's], is used in a special sense that must not be confused with its ordinary usage. In particular, 'information' must not be confused with 'meaning'." (Recent Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1949, page 8).
A book entitled Symbols, Signals & Noise, by John Pierce (Prof. of Engineering at Caltech), appeared in 1961. He produced a revised version in 1980 under the title An Introduction to Information Theory. (Those two titles alone tell a story.) In explaining differences between the two versions of his book, Pierce says, "… nor did I change everywhere 'communication theory' (Shannon's term) to 'information theory,' the term I would use today" (p. vii). Here is an example of a sentence where he did not make that change: "Communication theory tells us how to represent, or encode, messages from a particular message source efficiently for transmission" (1980, p. 8). [Note in passing what a terrific sentence that is: THAT'S Shannon in a nutshell.] Now consider how that sentence would have looked if he had done a "global replace" all through his 1980 revision: "Information theory tells us how to represent, or encode, messages…" When the actual subject is used ("Communication theory…") the sentence makes sense, but flatly contradicts the title of the 1980 book. Conversely, with "Information theory…" the sentence would not contradict the title of the 1980 book, but it would be a kind of gibberish, from the viewpoint of the general reader. This highlights what a mess it still is, 3/4 of a century on. It doesn't matter that Shannon uses the word 62 times [according to one Comment]; what matters is that he always uses it in a jargon sense [dating back to 1928, so what?] about which the public still has no clue.