Comment by dabiged
11 hours ago
Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
11 hours ago
Don't forget snap, crackle and pop, and quantum teleportation.
Physicists get a failing grade for naming things.
Meanwhile, on HN: "Don't use yarn, use bun it's written in zig!"
You mean post quantum, theoretical physics. Up to 19th and early 20th, physicists somehow knew how to name things. It is possible that the nature of the beast itself has changed and it attracts a different kind of mindsets ...
Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop. The potential confusion around Magic seems much greater, although when you consider the vastly more common opposite effect, where specific scientific terms become popular and quickly gain wholly different colloquial meanings, perhaps it doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things.
Perhaps Magic is even so ridiculous that it’s immune to co-option by charlatans. After all, they choose sciency words to lend an air of credibility. OTOH the perceived ridiculousness could also change rather quickly. It’s just the nature of language use…
> Maybe Greek and Latin vocabulary is just overextended at some point? I don’t really see the issue with Snap, Crackle and Pop.
What is "overextended" imho is an actual understanding of what these phenomena really are. Previously, we had some sense of what we meant by e.g. field or atom or electron, quantum, ...
So yea, if we don't know enough about the thing we're naming, we might as well pull random strings out of a hat and in that case "pop, snap, crackle, strange, charm, fifi, doodoo, woof, & meow" (note these latter 4 are my contributions to advancements of human understanding btw /g) are good enough!
Should call the next big physics thing doubtscumbagium...
Color charge and the strange and charm quarks are not post-quantum theoretical physics, are they?
There's also other areas where a current of picking simple names instead of greek/latin terms was popular for a while at least - Shannon named the smallest unit of information a "bit" after all.
That stuff is after Einstein, Heisenberg, and Bohr. When I mentioned quantum mechanics, these are the physicists I had in mind.
Maybe it is easier to get funding with catchy and/or mysterious names?
Most of the crazy names come from before "quantum" was co-opted by a lot of BS. I don't blame those physicists for naming things that way because the coopting was inevitable. However, we are now decades into that process, and it is inconceivable that the authors choosing the name "magic" are unaware of it. Which means they are doing it with knowledge beforehand, and they should know this is a bad idea.
It's not just a bad idea because of that BS, but even within the field it's just asking for trouble. We may all wish we were perfect Vulcans who have perfect mental separation between all concepts and emotions, but we aren't. It's going to have a small, but extremely persistent and long-term effect on the field if you seriously name a major part of it "magic". The emotional connotations simply can not help but smear into the putatively mathematical term. It's a high price to pay for what isn't really all that funny of a joke even the first time.
And of course the BS will crank up even higher. People get hurt by that, but I don't know how much to lay at the foot of people who are all but taunting them by naming something "magic", because most of the hurt was going to come anyhow and what particular guise it is wearing is of minimal importance. Still, why even sign up to be in the line of fire of responsibility for that sort of thing?