“Horrendous Space Kablooie” has oodles of pizzazz.
So a bunch of compact, hot stuff exploded out into a bunch of cool spread out stuff. That sounds like an explosion to me.
It didn’t explode. Putting that verb in bold doesn’t make it true. An explosion would be if high pressure pushed the universe out. That’s not what happened.
There wasn’t any “cool spread out stuff” to explode into. There wasn’t anything. Stop trying to use intuition to imagine it, because it just doesn’t work. The chronology of the BIg Bang was developed from our imperfect understanding of quantum physics and is entirely non-intuitive, with no relationship to Wiley Coyote cartoons.
We are the cool spread out stuff. I meant it exploded, turning from a bunch of compact, hot stuff into a bunch of cool spread out stuff, that’s what exploded means. We are the microbe on a bomb fragment.
The diagram in the wiki Cosmic Inflation describes it well, this is an explosion:
“Quantum leap” doesn’t qualify at all for this thread. It is not a scientific term.
Keep in mind that “quantum” is the Latin word for some vague amount. When Julius Caesar used quantum he wasn’t talking about atoms or anything. The Physicists use of the term is a much later, secondary meaning. People who use it in its original sense are not “wrong”.
My old e-dictionary gives the Physics sense as the third meaning.
And “quantum leap” actually does mean a big change and has nothing to do with discontinuity.
The web comic Quantum Vibe depicted that the fourth planet from the sun was colonized primarily by Han from China, and so everyone called it Huoxing. Now I wonder do the westernized names for the planets dominate the international astronomical community, or do non-Europeans still use their language’s astrological names for the planets? (For Europeans the two are one and the same).
I’ve wondered if time extrapolates back like that linearly, or if time is logarithmic and what we would call t=0 really effectively is infinity ago.
Gravity waves are waves where the restoring force is gravity - that’s not too bad, even it means that we’re stuck with gravitational wave for the Einstein stuff
Not in Mandarin, for example.
Mandarin has a few different terms for the milky way, including one that includes the character for “milk”.
But, checking on google scholar, it seems most Chinese papers on the milky way use the term 银河(系) = Silver river (system)
Imaginary numbers.
Isaac Asimov told an anecdote from his college days. A sociology professor said that mathematicians were “mystics” because they believed in numbers that weren’t real. Asimov argued that they were just as real as “real” numbers. It would have been simpler to make that point if they weren’t called “imaginary”.
I was recently rewatching this Numberphile video in which the presenter opines (at about 3:30) that “trigonometry” is “the worst-named topic in mathematics,” because sine, cosine, etc. are circular functions describing circular motion rather than being fundamentally about triangles. (I’m not sure whether I agree with “worst-named,” but I see his point.)
I think renaming it would stop a lot of uninformed speculation on the subject, because it is that “catchy name” that invites it in the first place.
For instance, “Most of the helium-3 and lithium in the Universe was formed during the Big Bang”. It wasn’t at t=0, but it was at a time when the Universe was a lot hotter and denser than it is now.
And then there’s the Killing vector.
Caesar used the word “quantum”, yes, but “quantum leap” doesn’t come from Caesar. It comes from its use in quantum mechanics. That’s the origin of the term. And in quantum mechanics, what it means is a discontinuous transition.
Oh, yes, I’m a big advocate on this one. I prefer the term “rotational numbers”.
Thanks. Most of the world’s papers were being written in English until the Chinese started catching up. Does that make them a special case, though?
[new topic]
Einstein’s Theory of Relativity has caused much confusion, not to mention bad jokes about relatives. Even Einstein later said that it should have been named the Theory of Invariants, since the speed of light is an absolute constant and drives everything else.
Good description. Doesn’t really suggest a better name, though.
I prefer complex numbers.
One of my graduate math courses was called, “Complex Analysis.” It was.
Techincally, the complex numbers include the real numbers, while “imaginary” refers to numbers that are not real. In the technical, mathematical sense, of course. If we used a different name for the imaginary numbers, would we need a different word for the real numbers also?
The problem with perfect information is that even something as simple as multiplying two undefinable real numbers by each other requires infinite accuracy– effectively, an infinite amount of information and an infinite amount of computation. Yet if the exact product of that (in principle) simple operation determines the path of an if/than branch then you already have an unpredictable outcome.
Imaginary numbers and complex numbers are different concepts.
An imaginary number is a real number multiplied by i.
A complex number is the sum of a real number and an imaginary number.
Since zero is real, imaginary numbers are a proper subset of complex numbers, and real numbers are a proper subset of complex numbers.
I’m still mad they renamed truth and beauty as top and bottom.
Along those lines: Complex numbers (already mentioned), so named not because they’re complicated, but because they’re made up of (are a complex of) a real and an imaginary number.
And irrational numbers: It’s not that they make less sense than the rational numbers, it’s that they can’t be expressed as ratios of integers.