It’s time for a little good luck, don’t you think? The Grouch read an absorbing Op-Ed in Sunday’s NYTimes, written by Dr. Lisa Randall of the Physics faculty at Harvard. In a careful and thoughtful exposition, she states that much of the gulf between scientists and other people trying to understand what scientists are up is traceable to language. Scientists may not always be aware, or may not care, how the public understands words that appear to have the same meaning in both
“domains”, but really don’t. One such word is “theory”. Another, “relativity”. And a nice third, “uncertainty” and in the much-misunderstood Uncertainty Principle. Each of these terms has a very precise “semantic freight” to the scientific practitioner, but that precision often gets lost when discussion leaves the seminar room, or the pages of professional journals, and hits CNN. Lab slang may get promoted to official terminology, leaving the Citizen to puzzle about how subatomic particles can have “flavor” or “charm”, for example. The BG has always harbored a little Lower Class resentment against people who talk like that, wondering if these guys are just laughing at the stiffs who fund their research but who couldn’t follow three minutes of a physics lecture. Dr. Randall covers some of this terrain, and then goes on to talk about some ideas that are really hard to understand, and visualize….extra dimensionality for one. This, as it happens, is the author’s specialty. She has written extensively on this topic and her work has been very widely quoted and cited. The good news, you ask? Well, the BG was trying to find the text online for this week’s LibraryLink but came up dry, until today when Scitech Daily Review made a link available to The Edge, an egg-head zine which has arranged with the NYT to offer Dr. Randall’s remarks online.
The Edge