Pet Peeves About Scientific Terminology

[Airbrush]

Here are a few of mine:

1.  "SAGITTARIUS A STAR" This title bothered me for many years until I figured it out.  Why do they call a supermassive black hole a "STAR"?  Black holes are NOT stars!  Then I finally realized it means "Sagittarius A ASTERISK."  That is dumb.  Call it "Sagittarius A Hole".

2.  Why not call:  Dark Matter = Unknown Gravity?  Why not call:  Dark Energy = Space Energy?  Because no can do, we must stay with the original racist terms.

3.  Why RPMs?  That means either "revolutions per minute" or "rounds per minute."  Call it something people, such as I, can relate to.  Say "RPS" or "revolutions per second" and "rounds per second" to save your reader from the doing math, dividing by 60, to figure out how fast that is.  A second is very easy to understand.  A minute is way beyond comprehension, unless you are a science expert.  Don't get me started with "megaparsecs" or "astronomical units" when you could easily use "light years" or "light days" or "light minutes" which are FAR EASIER for most people to visualize.

4.  Pedestrians who leisurely cross the street paying no attention to cars waiting for them.

Any others?

[Phi for All]

25 minutes ago, Airbrush said:

2.  Why not call:  Dark Matter = Unknown Gravity? 

Because it isn't. It has a gravitational effect like all matter, but it's not gravity itself. 

27 minutes ago, Airbrush said:

Why not call:  Dark Energy = Space Energy?

Because space isn't a thing that can have a property like energy. I've heard folks make a distinction between "space" and "outer space", where space is all geometric properties and outer space has a temperature and density and pressure, but Outer Space Energy is also misleading.

29 minutes ago, Airbrush said:

Because no can do, we must stay with the original racist terms.

Do you have any evidence that the term was intended to be racist? AFAIK, "dark" refers to being undetectable via the electromagnetic force. Light doesn't reflect off of it, so it's called dark, as in "hard to spot". If this is your real objection to the term, perhaps you've misunderstood.

 

[swansont]

4 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Here are a few of mine:

1.  "SAGITTARIUS A STAR" This title bothered me for many years until I figured it out.  Why do they call a supermassive black hole a "STAR"?  Black holes are NOT stars!  Then I finally realized it means "Sagittarius A ASTERISK."  That is dumb.  Call it "Sagittarius A Hole".

2.  Why not call:  Dark Matter = Unknown Gravity?  Why not call:  Dark Energy = Space Energy?  Because no can do, we must stay with the original racist terms.

3.  Why RPMs?  That means either "revolutions per minute" or "rounds per minute."  Call it something people, such as I, can relate to.  Say "RPS" or "revolutions per second" and "rounds per second" to save your reader from the doing math, dividing by 60, to figure out how fast that is.  A second is very easy to understand.  A minute is way beyond comprehension, unless you are a science expert.  Don't get me started with "megaparsecs" or "astronomical units" when you could easily use "light years" or "light days" or "light minutes" which are FAR EASIER for most people to visualize.

 

Because science isn’t here to conform to your preferences. The world doesn’t revolve around you.

The people who actually do science get to name things. Sometimes names provided by others stick, and inertia takes over. None of these avenues (or other possible ones) involves consulting you for approval. Perhaps a unit of hubris could be named for you.

[OldChemE]

Well-- we probably all have our pet peeves--but for communication in science we have to have some terminology-- even if it seems arbitrary.

I "grew up" in engineering using English units, and got good at remembering the gravity to force conversion (32.2 ft-lbm/lbf-sec^2).  Then the US started using metric which I realized was neat because I didn't have to remember the weird conversions-- until I realized I had to remember the real units behind Newtons and Joules.  Newton and Joule should be honored to know that scientists thought so highly of them that they used their names to make metric units less transparent. 😏

Edited March 3 by OldChemE

[TheVat]

I used to think teslas were oddly large, until I understood how they were SI derived and really useful for rating industrial strength magnets, particle accelerators, MRIs, etc.  And a white dwarf's field is around 100 T (which would be what, a million gauss?)

 The superconducting magnet built around the CMS detector at CERN is 4 T.

The superconducting ITER magnet system is 13 T.

 But my favorite magnetic field is the one required to levitate a frog (by diamagnetic levitation of the water in its body tissues) according to the 2000 Ig Nobel Prize in Physics:  16 T.  No idea how the frog is doing, after that.

 

[CharonY]

2 hours ago, swansont said:

Because science isn’t here to conform to your preferences. The world doesn’t revolve around you.

The people who actually do science get to name things. Sometimes names provided by others stick, and inertia takes over. None of these avenues (or other possible ones) involves consulting you for approval. Perhaps a unit of hubris could be named for you.

I actually thought that I OP was a satire post that I just didn't fully get (based on calling something an a-hole). Still not sure that it isn't, actually.

[swansont]

20 minutes ago, CharonY said:

I actually thought that I OP was a satire post that I just didn't fully get (based on calling something an a-hole). Still not sure that it isn't, actually.

My default is to take threads at face value and not read anything into them.

[KJW]

8 hours ago, Airbrush said:

Call it "Sagittarius A Hole".

That's funny, like the name of this chemical compound:

 

[joigus]

For a while I felt nervous about zitterbewegung and bremsstrahlung, but it grows on you.

[sethoflagos]

10 hours ago, joigus said:

For a while I felt nervous about zitterbewegung and bremsstrahlung, but it grows on you.

At least they sound more impressive than their literal English translations ('jitter motion' and 'braking radiation').

I'd not call it a 'pet peeve' as such but I've learnt to always bear in mind that translations of foreign technical documents are rarely error free. I had a salutory lesson during design work for a couple of utillties supply facilities in Malaysia. I requested some local groundwater analyses from the client, and when they arrived I learnt that the Malay word for water is 'air'. That caused a stir of interest at the hazard and operability review.

[joigus]

8 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

At least they sound more impressive than their literal English translations ('jitter motion' and 'braking radiation').

  German scientific terms are generally very precise. They feel no embarrassment in making long composite words tagging essential characteristics of the thing. Bremsstrahlung in Spanish is radiación de frenado, which is exactly 'braking radiation', but requires three words.

8 hours ago, sethoflagos said:

and when they arrived I learnt that the Malay word for water is 'air'.

Pronounced as in English, I assume.

[CharonY]

7 hours ago, joigus said:

 German scientific terms are generally very precise.

The neat thing is that one can often deduce what is meant by those words. 

[joigus]

2 hours ago, CharonY said:

The neat thing is that one can often deduce what is meant by those words. 

Yes! It's like a tinkertoy assembly for logically compressed inflexions[?]. Whatever I mean by that... For some reason, phonetics, syllables and their frequencies, it seems to be very friendly to the forming of composite words. The end result doesn't sound awkward.