🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <STEINLY.92Jul29155344@topaz.ucsc.edu>,
steinly@topaz.ucsc.edu (Steinn Sigurdsson) writes:
|>In article <76737@ut-emx.uucp> ethan@ut-emx.uucp (Ethan Tecumseh
Vishniac) writes:
|>
|>
|>   these complications have well understood solutions. It is 
|>   unfortunate if using the word particle causes some nonphysicists
|>   to assume that mass is involved, but inventing a new word would
|>   lead to greater confusion.
|>
|>Yes, but neologisms are such fun! 
|>Not only that, but a careful choice of metaphor
|>can lead to decade long confusion in the popular culture
|>about relationships between science and random metaphysical
|>inanities, providing for endless hours of fascinating cocktail
|>party conversations visavis the relationship between theoretical
|>physics and suitably obscure theologies...
|>

I always get this. My wife is in public policy so when I accompany
her to various events someone will always politely ask me "and what
do you do?" I reply that I am a physicist and I study plasma physics.
The usual first response is "so you work in the medical area". After I
try to clear that one up by explaining what a plsma is and that I
concentrate on fusion power concepts I usually get a remark of, "Oh,
yes I followed with great interest the stories in the Wall Street
Journal about the wonderful new results in Salt Lake City, you must
very excited." After a few more rounds of this usually either I am
frustrated or their eyes have galzed in noninterst/boredom. Conversation
quickly turns to how tasty the salmon mousse is.

Sometimes it seems that the nomenclature we use was intentionally
designed by a 1930's flim-flam artist to confuse. While professionals
may not have trouble sorting it out, it is clear to me that laymen and
the public at large are excluded (partly) by this artificial barrier.

It is not that the language is filled with "cutesy" names like quark and
gluon, but rather that the learned logic is really counterintuitive.
For example, in QFT some spend a great deal of time worrying about
Tachyons and Ghosts (unless you're infatuated with BRST theory). Thus it
appears that one is studying that which does not exist. Or the classic
one is how it is so tempting to interpret Feynman diagrams as an actual
particle trajectory in space time rather than a schematic graph that is a
shorthand for a calculation of an amplitude. In my mind the problem is that
terminology often gets set by those who first perceive dimly the issues
at hand. Later others reach a more complete and pedagogically more
satisfying understanding, but the lore is very slow to drop the initial
terminology. For example how long was it before the compact vector notation
was the "normal" method for expressing maxwell's equations?

john w. cobb
jwc@fusion.ph.utexas.edu
plasma physicist //// I mean //// ionized particle dynamics physicist