From a footnote on page 69 of Seth Lloyd’s new book Programming the Universe (about which more later):
I happened to be in [Nobel Laureate Norman Ramsey’s office in Paris] when two members of the Academie Francaise came to call. “Why, Professeur Ramsey,” they inquired, “is French not the international language of Science?” Ramsey immediately answered them in his fluent French, with a thick midwestern accent. Horrified, they dropped the subject. In fact, the French Academy of Sciences caused the adoption of English as the international language of science in the seventeenth century by being the first national academy to abandon the previous international language, Latin, and publish their proceedings in their own language. The English and the Germans followed suit. The rest is just an accident of history.
Alain Connes
ftp://ftp.alainconnes.org/maths.pdf
As a layman, I understand this. Simple and direct. Yet in imaging if you exploded those views from the math basis could ambiguity creep in? Sure.
That’s why we need good teachers who can master both for the public at large. Good computer modellers who can match the math to visualizations
Often I find that those who had done well critized, like , Smolin, Greene, and the many other fine writers, who had brought the public up to date.
Who You Going to Call!
So looking at Clifford’s threesome, I might call it, Science’s Ghost/Myth Busters? 🙂
> English is likely the most expressive language, if
> that means anything, just because of the number of
> words.
There is more to expressiveness than word counts.
I feel limited in English, despite having spoken it
most of my life, because it simply lacks entire
affective registers efficiently expressible in some
other languages with particles, diminutives, etc.
These would be so unnatural to reproduce in English
that it is never done, as a result of which certain
modalities are simply never expressed in English.
Recently, some fellow mathematicians and I had a similar conversation about the idea of Chinese replacing English as the language of the sciences. I was on the ‘no’ side — Chinese is a tone language (with four tones), which is difficult for speakers of non-tone languages to learn. Many people have a hard time even distinguishing the tones, let alone learning to use them correctly. Add to that the difficulty of reading and writing Chinese (even some speakers I know find this nontrivial), and I doubt that we’ll see Chinese take over as the lingua franca.
On the other hand, perhaps Chinese and English will spawn some linguistic bastard child…