An open thread comment over at Making Light triggered a discussion of what words and phrases could serve as reliable markers of SF fandom. (It continues for a good while, but at times is nearly buried in discussion of Japanese knotweed.).
This got me to wondering about what phrases would serve as similar markers for scientists– that is, what are the words or phrases that would reliably mark someone as a scientist (other than a tendency to start sentences with “So, …”)?
My best guess for a general science phrase would be some variant of “[really hard thing] is left as an exercise for the reader.” That seems to be a standard feature of science textbooks of all sorts, and anybody who’s taken a good number of science classes would probably recognize it at once.
Another good one, on the experimental side, would be the phrase “typical data,” which is used in papers and presentations to mean “the nicest-looking data set I could find.” I’m not sure if there’s a theoretical equivalent, but even theorists seem to know that “typical data” is a phrase to be wary of.
In the physical and mathematical sciences, something like “In the limit of large/small _____” or “For large/small values of _____” is probably a good marker. I often refer to my old group at NIST as working in “the Infinite Money Limit,” which isn’t entirely accurate, but which resonates pretty well with a lot of physics people. I’m not sure how well that works for bio types, though.
Suggestions of other recognition signals for science nerds (other than, you know, terrific dress sense and great social skills) can be left in the comments.
I’m a physics grad student and a few linguistic markers I’ve noticed are the use of the word “eon” to describe long periods of time and the phrase “orders of magnitude” (as in “This bar is whole orders of magnitude better than any of the others around here”).
Describing a disproportionate emotional reaction as “going nonlinear” or making a reference to spontaneous symmetry breaking when making an arbitrary choice.
Some words I’ve often heard physicists/mathematicians use when talking in “real life”:
-canonical (as in “the canonical time for seminars is 2 pm”)
-cutoff (as in “the cutoff time for this meeting is 5 pm”)
-to a first-order aproximation
-arbitrary
-constraints
-trivial
You would hope that it would be: “…and what was the control?”
Don’t forget approximations to first order. I had a prof go off on a tangent once which ended with the phrase “…and so Napoleon’s march to Russia was a total disaster, to first order.”
“It turns out that…”
“Order of magnitude” or “to first order” are terms I use all the time as if everybody should understand in everyday speech what they need.
Here’s a sort of different example. I have a friend with all of the Farscape DVDs whose taking me through that series. (I never watched it the first time around.) It’s a fluffy, fun series, that doesn’t take itself entirely seriously. However, there was a moment of good science in it. Something was going on (I don’t remember what), and one character, after saying what she thought was going on, asked another, “Well, what’s your theory?”
This second character is supposed to be an ubersmart scientist/athlete type guy, and his response: “I don’t have a theory, I have a hypothesis.”
I was so happy. I expressed my happiness, and my friend thought I was a freak (though he already knew that). It made me almost as happy as the first episode of Babylon 5 (or, for that matter, the new Battlestar Galactica series) where the starfighters had to deal with Newtonian Dynamics in a way that spacecraft hadn’t needed to since the 1977 release of Star Wars. You could tell I was a scientist because of how happy I was to see somehting in popular culture understand the scientific, as opposed to popular, definition of the word “theory”.
What should one glean from this: perhaps scientists are sometimes unwilling to use the popular definitions of terms that mean other things in science, and can be caught using what seems to be slightly odd terminology as a result.
-Rob
So, I do that “so” thing *all* the time, even when I’m writing, and it annoys the hell out of me. I thought it was just me; now I know I can blame it on science.
for theoretical physicists, there are two types of plots. The first purports to agree with some experiment. Here the phrase is something like “agrees with X’s data with similar parameters” = “our parameters are the same as X’s up to a factor of 5, plus an extra fitting parameter we average over”.
The second kind is to predict some new effect that can be seen in the lab, like “this cool effect can be seen with small improvements in current experiments” => “If they can be 10 times better (for good theorists) or 100-1000 times better (for bad theorists).
This is in an AMO context, for cosmology, the allowed error bars are larger!
Now I’m kicking myself for not thinking of “…to first order” as a marker. That’s absolutely one, as is “order of magnitude.”
Perry:
This is in an AMO context, for cosmology, the allowed error bars are larger!
For astronomy, the error bars are usually on the exponent…
I always thought that I overuse “so” because English is not my native language. So, it’s not so bad.
Using the term “clearly” to highlight ones cleverness is a good one. Another is searching “parameter space” or witnessing a “hydrodynamic disassembly”. Astronomers like to refer to the royal “We” when revealing especially juicy insights- “So, we now believe that Wolf-Rayet 241 is clearly an order of magnitude larger than…”. Sigh.
My favorite is using the modulus operator (as in 13 mod 5 is 3) in everyday speech. As in, “Hawking is a great guy, modulo all of that stuff about leaving earth for another planet…”
My wife gets me for the use of “Non-zero”, as in “There is a non-zero chance that…”
Rather delicate and precise usage of terms like “approximation” and “assumption” seem to be halmarks of physicists, if not other scientists.
The issue of dervations, proofs, and problems being left to readers/students is also found in engineering texts as well as science and maths texts. I have put the question to several other authors and the only consistent thread of answer I have received is that the author has a rather clever derivation/proof/solution but is loathe to include it lest it distract as well as make the book too long.
The issue of dervations, proofs, and problems being left to readers/students is also found in engineering texts as well as science and maths texts. I have put the question to several other authors and the only consistent thread of answer I have received is that the author has a rather clever derivation/proof/solution but is loathe to include it lest it distract as well as make the book too long.
My favorite variant of this is from the quantum book I used my senior year in college, which glossed over about four pages of algebra with the phrase “A few minutes’ thought will show that…”
1) The use of “we” as the first person singular with verbs of cognition and perception (“we know”, “we show”, “we observe”).
2) The use of terms such as “(non-)trivial”, “canonical”, “approximate”, “invariant”, “linear”, “permutation”, “isomorphic” and “modulo” in unusual contexts. (“I don’t care about cabinet reshuffles: the total sum of the evilness of all politicians is clearly invariant under permutations”, “All fundamentalisms are isomorphic: Baptists and Wahhabis are identical modulo a transformation mapping the Bible to the Quran”)
3) Chains of sentences each beginning with words like “hence”, “therefore”, “thus” etc.
4) Using diagrams to elucidate concepts and structures (I know of a guy who has been known to draw diagrams of people’s “relationship networks” when gossipping about them…)
I got nailed as a scientist the other day for using “et al.” when describing more than one item. Oops. 🙂
Here are a few:
“…for certain local values of ” [whatever x is being discussed].
“…as it asymptotically approaches” [some y]
“meets the spec” and, related,
“to several nines”.
Casual references to clutter or mess as “high-entropy” situations.
A carload of us were hunting for a parking space somewhere within walking distance of Chinatown, and were talking about “performing a least-squares search”, much to the dismay of our GFs. (Inefficient search algorithms then became known as “searching by most-squares”.)
I’d say any sort of use of the phrases “boundary conditions” or “impedance mismatch” in everyday conversation is a hint that someone might be a physicist. The second one might be more of an EE thing, but the first is all physicist.
I have caught myself using “blasting” when I meant “googling”, lately…
So I started doing this when I was working in the US, and I can’t shake it. I think it’s a very useful little tag to say to the listener you are about to say something new or something important. At least that’s the idea. Philosophers use the word ‘well’ for this.
Other tics are “..so what you do is you take..” for describing how to do anything. Often scientists will just use unusual words to describe something very accurately. Anyone else ever deconvolute their sock drawer?