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How to talk like a Physicist : Talk Like a Physicist Day march 14, 2009
How do I talk like a Physicist, a primer
Here are some terms that Physicists use:
Order of Magnitude: Use terms like “orders of magnitude” to describe significant differences of scale.
Negligible: When something is small, say it is “negligible” non-zero, but negligible.
Infinitesimal: If it is really really small, say it is infinitesimal.
Non-trivial: For a physicist, nothing is ever hard or difficult – it is always “non-trivial”
First-order approximation : That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order approximation.”
Canonical: Use “canonical” when you mean “usual” or “standard.” As in, “the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word ‘canonical.’”
Orthogonal: Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”
Empirical Data: Any actual personal experience becomes “empirical data.” i.e. a burn on your hand is empirical data that the stove is hot.
Ground State: You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state.
Extrapolation: A semi-educated guess is an extrapolation
Ideal Case: You aren’t ignoring details, you are taking the ideal case
Vanishingly small: A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible.” Really small is “infinitesimal”
Potential Well: Stuck in a meeting is “trapped in a potential well,” though you hope you can “tunnel out.”
Blackhole: If there is no escape, you are trapped by a black hole, from which there is no escape.
Photons: It’s not light, they are photons. Turning on the lamp becomes emitting photons.
Exercise to Reader: The rest is history becomes “the rest is left as an exercise to the reader…”
Not even wrong. Someone is making an argument using assumptions that are known to be wrong, or are making an argument that can’t be falsified. Courtesy Wolfgang Pauli. “Wait, he’s assuming Ron Paul can still win the Republican nomination? That’s not even wrong.”
For very small values of. This one, I’m afraid, I can best explain by example. “So there are four of us going to dinner.” “Three.” “Okay, so there are four of us for very small values of four.”
Super position: If something seems to act like something else, I say that it’s in a “superposition of the two states”.
Other good words to add to your vocabulary:
Discontinuity
Renormalize
Positive and negative work
God Particle
Dark Energy
Space-time continuum
Other rules:
When you are asked a question, think of improbable ways a statement could be true and then at the end make sure to give correct answer.
When a mere mortal is asked a question “Can a pig fly?” typically the answerer is “No.”
However a physicist will respond as follows:
“They could if there was no gravity, or in interstellar space, or if they had wings, or if they were dropped off a cliff (though it would be a short flight). Generally the answer is NO.”
Here is another example of the same rule:
Q: two trains are a approaching each other at 40 mph and are 8 miles apart, when will they cross each other? An untrained person would say “in about 6 minutes”.
A physicist would respond as:
If the trains are on the same track, they will not cross each other but run in to each other; when you say approaching each other, are the trains engines facing each other? they could go around the world and then cross each other, but for that I need to know the location of the trains. Also, I need to know the lengths of each of the trains to accurately calculate this, but in a trivially simple situation, the trains will cross each other in 6 minutes.
Again, make sure that the correct answer is always present at the end.
Thanks to Sean, JerseyBoy, Swans on tea, dr. Dev. Stephan at Live granades, James Cronen and many others who have commented on various blogs on this issue.
Please check out the FAQ for additional information.
Talk Like a Physicist
Posted by Sunny Kalara | 9 Comments
Talk like a physicist – is the glass half full or half empty?
Talk Like a Physicist : March 14th, 2009
The glass is neither half full nor half empty, it is a superposition of a states that is half full and half empty. If you randomly measured the liquid in the glass, half the time you will find that the glass is half full and other half of the time you will find that the glass is half empty – and that is the MOST accurate what to describe the above scenario.
Also, in case you are wondering what happened to the half of the liquid in this glass – yup, you guessed it, the Schrodinger’s cat licked it.
Talk Like a Physicist
Posted by Sunny Kalara | 1 Comment
Talk Like a Physicist Day – A nation of Einsteins
Talk Like a Physicist Day : March 14, 2009
A nation of Einsteins
Check out the FAQ on how to talk like a physicist
Talk Like a Physicist
Posted by Sunny Kalara | 0 Comments
More physics related facebook status messages part III
#Sunny is wearing neutrino repellent armor.
#Sunny : my Schrödinger cat is entangled; might need to call a quantum mechanic.
#Sunny : recession is so bad – I checked the value of pi yesterday and it has gone down to e.
#Sunny is using his pet butterfly to control chaos.
#Sunny is probing ink molecules with nonresonant light.
#Sunny is playing with photon entanglement.
#Sunny is in Metastable Equilibrium and likes it.
#Sunny is an isomer: similar composition but of dissimilar properties.
#Sunny is continuous everywhere but differentiable nowhere. He is a rebel.
Previous ones are reproduced here:
* Sunny is so cool, he is measured in Kelvins.
* Sunny can see past the event horizon.
* Sunny is defying the uncertainty principle.
* Sunny is made up entirely of dark matter.
* Sunny is blue shifted.
* Sunny is circumpolar.
* Sunny is gravitational lensing
* Sunny is a part of Proton Proton chain responsible for the fusion on the Sun.
* Sunny is a supernova remnant
* Sunny is emanating Hawking radiation
* Sunny is made entirely out of strange quarks – that explains a lot!
* Sunny is cursed with non-zero vacuum energy
* Sunny is a boson.
* Sunny is in a phase lock with a wine glass.
* Sunny’s time arrow points in random direction – I’ll see you yesterday, may be.
* Sunny lives in a quantum constrained system
* Sunny is your long lost supersymmetric partner.
* Sunny is using gravitational lens to warm up earth.
* Sunny is a part of a binary blackhole system.
* Sunny thrives on curved space time.
* Sunny is a pseudo random number generator.
* Sunny is not the problem, he is not the solution – he is the math between the problem and the solution.
* Sunny might not be omnipotent, but under the right circumstances he is nilpotent.
* Sunny doesn’t follow gravity; gravity follows him.
Here are the status messages from the first list of physicist’s facebook status messages:
* Sunny feels the chill from the the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) being cooled to 1.9 Kelvin (-271C; -456F) – colder than deep space. Where did I put my space heater?
* Sunny feels like he’s diagonally parked in a parallel universe.
* Sunny exists purely as a probability density function; he can be at more than one places at the same time.
* Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.
* Sunny is still searching for Higgs.
* I abhor M theory with every fiber of my being.
* almost finished with the paper, I just has to dot my “i” and cross my “h”.
* Sunny has learned not to store plutonium in a tupperwear container.
* is pondering, if Schroedinger’s Cat walks into a forest, and no one is around to observe it, is he really in the forest?
* Wanted, dead AND alive, Schrödinger’s Cat.
Talk Like a Physicist
Posted by Sunny Kalara | 9 Comments
Tuesday Physics Tattoo : Jono’s Maxwell’s Equations
Love the bright red question mark for the Gauss’s law. It leave open the possibility of a magnetic monopole.
Especially since most physicists believe that the magnetic monopoles do exist.
If the magnetic monopoles do exist then the Gauss’s law (third equation) needs to be changed and I think Faraday’s law (second equation) will change too.
Maxwell’s equations tattoo. Source Osunick’s photostream
Talk Like a Physicist