For years now, the visionaries over at Cocktail Party Physics have been suggesting that we institute a new national holiday, Talk Like a Physicist Day. After all, pirates have their own speech-pattern day, and physicists have shaped the modern world in ways almost as profound as pirates.
Now it looks like a day has been chosen: March 14, beloved by mathematicians as Pi Day, but also notable as Einstein’s birthday. What could work better? And, like any good movement, this one has its own blog! The excitement is palpable. This is a non-trivial undertaking, so brush off your power laws and ready your equations of motion, and to a first approximation you too can talk like a physicist.
Of course, any good holiday needs accessories. Happily, there is no shortage of items to choose from. Let me just mention one irresistible gift idea: particle plushies.
That’s right, an impressive and growing collection of cuddly representations of your favorite subatomic particles, from old reliables (“the muon: a heavy electron who lives fast and dies young”) to friends you would someday like to meet (“Higgs boson: he’s a bit of a snob, because he’s sometimes referred to as the `God particle'”). You know your whole family wants them.
And, just in case you don’t know what it sounds like to talk like a physicist, here’s an admirable example set by a famous non-physicist: Richard Dawkins (via onegoodmove).
Part of a much longer documentary, Break the Science Barrier. See Dawkins allow a deadly pendulum to swing to within inches of his nose! He explains that he is not in any danger, because there are “laws of physics” that ensure the pendulum doesn’t have enough energy to smash his head into a million gooey pieces. That’s good physicist-talk right there.
Of course, had Dawkins been reading our comment threads lately, he would get the impression that a true scientist has to be open-minded about macroscopic phenomena, not rely on any supposed understanding of “conservation of energy.” Science doesn’t know everything! How can he be sure that there aren’t forces science just hasn’t detected yet, that won’t send that pendulum careening into his smug puss? He keeps relying on his fancy “Newtonian mechanics,” probably based on some sort of “equations,” but he should recognize that the world is a mysterious place! With closed-minded hidebound reactionary equation-based establishment hacks like Richard Dawkins, it’s no wonder science hasn’t made any progress over the last couple of centuries.
(In case you’re wondering, all of the above was perfectly good physicist-talk. Physicists love mockery.)
Really? Physicists are serious about this? Why, is it because we don’t alienate the general public enough with our incomprehensible speech patterns?
How about something really revolutionary, like, “physicists talk like regular people” day. Or “communication day”, where we try to explain the bizarre things we work on in terms that a high school student could understand? (Not *us* when we were high school students, but average people.) I don’t think that encouraging people to babble about “the gravitational radiation emitted via self-force in a Kerr background” or some such is going to do anything other than isolate physicists from the general public even further.
“How can he be sure that there aren’t forces science just hasn’t detected yet, that won’t send that pendulum careening into his smug puss?”
I think his point is that understanding basic science can help us make more reasonable decisions in this world. The chance that there’s a yet undiscovered physical principle (that has waited until the second he lets go of the ball to show itself) is fairly unlikely.
My concern is that the string breaks! Newtonian physics says nothing about shotty craftmanship. 😉 That would make a much better YouTube video, though.
Ethan, excellent! A lack of any detectable sense of humor is very much characteristic of many physicists. That’s the spirit!
Do you really think wearing an orange fleece dunce cap is going to advance the cause of physics?
Oh, right. I forgot that what was said was that Newtonian mechanics can fall apart at any time, and that there were no other dynamics in play that accounted for both observations in accordance with Newtonian mechanics and deviations from them. Silly me. But perhaps if I had seen an equation that described those forces, I could take the idea seriously.
(How was that? Was that good physicist talk?)
The terms to use on 3.14 are “order of magnitude”, “approximation”, etc. These can work well in ordinary situations.
Or better yet: “first-order approximation”: That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee…
And the sarcasm meter goes off the charts! 🙂
A sarcasm detector, that’s a real useful invention. 🙂
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Here’s my advance entry, a joke I put up on Usenet (and Backreaction too, IIRC) awhile ago. It is more, talk like a comedian having fun with physics and culture:
Q: How did life start?
A: From Atom and eV.
Well, you have to pronounce eV the right way, but I hope it gives a chuckle or two. I’ll pass on whether the God Particle needed to start them off. That goes back into the process of decompactification and inflation. At that dawn of our universe, 4-play started the ticking of time and the erection of three large dimensions of space out of 9 or 10 teensy weensy ones.
So we do what exactly? Put on some grubby clothes, walk around not paying attention to anything, while muttering “G-mu-nu, G-mu-nu”?
Yes, I know, that’s plagiarism.
“First-order approximation”: My wife HATES that phrase when I use it. Normally it’s used in the context of “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order approximation.”
Some other ideas are, when talking about problems/projects, suggest that you approach the problem by assuming:
1)spherical symmetry
2)a power series expansion
3)something that is slightly off mass-shell
4)the technical details of the math are irrelevant 🙂
5)you are in the ground state
Another physicist joke for you, to be used on March 14:
Why do physicist believe all odd numbers are prime numbers?
Well, 3 is a prime, 5 is a prime, 7 is a prime, 9 is a measurement error, 11 is a prime, 13 is a prime; and from here we can extrapolate.
Just when the earthquake strikes.
Lord beat me to it! How mysterious is an earthquake?
Not to mention a small high-speed black hole passing near the earth, disrupting its gravity momentarily!
I’m kidding. No need to point out that either of those events would be fatal without involving the deathulum.
physicist: first-order approximation
chemist: standard deviation
biologist: 95% confidence interval
engineer: one sigma, two sigma, three…
mathematician: you all infuriate me.
And the answer to what long range forces are there besides gravity and em (really), they are called bullets.
Hm, can I neglect gravity and friction as trivial? I wonder if I use “by inspection” …
Sean:
>
> See Dawkins allow a deadly pendulum to swing to within inches of his nose!
He explains that he is not in any danger, because there are “laws of physics”
that ensure the pendulum doesn”t have enough energy to smash his head into
a million gooey pieces.
Some months ago I read an interesting diary a private wrote during his time in the Peninsular War [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peninsular_War ]. There were some poignant vignettes, such as he and a group of his comrades sitting on a hillside one sunny afternoon discussing the coming age of steam and all the wonders they’d live to see. But naturally there were tragedies to relate as well, and Dawkins with his pendulum game reminded me of one ghastly incident.
Toward the end of a battle a 24 pounder cannon ball whistled over from the French lines. Having bounced a couple of times, it was rolling along the ground, a young British soldier pursued it. Seeing this, guessing his intention and with more experience knowing the likely result, a sergeant yelled at him repeatedly not to touch it. But not hearing him, or ignoring his entreaties, the new recruit stuck his foot out to stop the cannon ball. By that time the ball had apparently slowed to a crawl, and hardly seemed to be moving at all; but it still managed to knock the poor guy’s foot clean off!
Yes, by all means talk like a physicst. Whenever anyone tells you something which is true, make sure to let them know you already knew it and that you regard it as “trivial”. If they tell you something which is false, don’t just tell them they are wrong but that it is “obvious” they are wrong. If they tell you something you did not know or do not understand, make sure to make it clear that you regard this piece of information as “irrelevent”. No matter what they say, always make it clear that you are smarter than they are.
LOL at comment 3.
One thing, don’t refer to the numbers zero or one directly. Day “vanishingly small” or “vanishes,” and for one, say “unity.” Also, when talking about something you say “It is easy to see that _____” for snobbish purposes (especially when it isn’t easy.)
Sean,
As someone in another profession said, “The best defence is a good offence.”
Rather then arguing the details, which most normal people ignore, maybe science can debate the basic logic of the primary metaphysical establishment. Such as pointing out that since the absolute is a neutral base state, not an ideal form, then a spiritual absolute would be the essence out of which life rises and to which it falls, not a model of perfection from which it fell and to which it seeks to return.
Or would that be too promiscuous?
An ansatz to the ‘Talk Like a Physicist’ problem: Throw in random German words, like ‘brehmsstahlung’ and ‘zitterbewegung’. Oh, and ‘ansatz’.
That should work at least to first order, if you assume a spherical physicist.