In our next video, @anon61221983 explains the Holy Roman Empire.
5 Likes
Well it wasn’t Holy, wasn’t Roman, and wasn’t an Empire. So theres that.
6 Likes
Alan Dean Foster?!?!?
He only wrote the novelization. He must have a great agent!
5 Likes
I thought her first book Space at the Speed of Light, was all too short, This looks to be twice as long-- a good sign, imo.
1 Like
I think that @anon87143080 summed it up nicely! 
7 Likes
When Newton used the term ‘gravity’, it was generally understood to mean the opposite of ‘levity’ - both as a property of things and a mood. Here is Hogarth’s take on it…
William Hogarth - «The Weighing House» — Anglais
This is how words work. Terms sound silly at first, but the shortest and punchiest tend to survive. ‘Big Bang’ was originally a term of ridicule for the theory - the universe was not big, and there was no bang as such, but it works. I am no big fan of ‘Dark Star’. Astronomers commonly use ‘Dark’ in a somewhat archaic sense of ‘not seen’ - the Dark Side of the Moon faces away from us, and Dark Matter is transparent. So, naming something ‘Dark Star’ when it is neither unseen, nor a star in the conventional sense is not progress as far as I can see. I can take issue with the ‘Completely Collapsed’ acronym, as we don’t know whether it collapses completely or is stopped by some yet unknown principle (what happens to the entropy if it goes to a point?). It collapses enough to have an Event Horizon, and that’s all we can tell from the outside (for now, at least). It may be neither black nor a hole, but ‘Black Hole’ captures the sense of finality that goes with the thing.
I like to visualize it as space being the medium we pass through and a black hole is a discontinuity / phase change / etc of the space. That the intense gravity “condenses” space into a “solid” that doesn’t make sense to us, who don’t see the medium of space much at all.
1 Like
I’d imagine that, to survive as any flavor of physicist, you have to get used to enduring the fact that things that interest you will be inaccurately described; since most of them don’t actually have accurate natural language descriptions or accurate mathematical descriptions accessible to nonspecialists.
2 Likes
I think, for me, this is the reason I don’t think what a black hole is called, matters. Atoms aren’t unbreakable. Quantum fields have no relationship to pasture or farmland. “Blackbody radiation” is what’s commonly known as “white light.” Relativistic “paradoxes” contain no contradictions. And none of it matters, the terms are still just fine if they’re used correctly in context.
just because something doesn’t matter doesn’t make it uninteresting. ( which, i guess, makes it matter again. just in a different way. )
while all words are some what arbitrary combinations of sounds, the history of those sounds can tell us a lot about people, and in this case about science… even if the sounds themselves wouldn’t convey any particularly useful information to a fish. ( or a toad, i suppose )
1 Like
I agree! It’s incredibly fun (at least, for me, and it sounds like you too) to learn about why we use the words we use for different things, in physics and otherwise. Only once I do learn that etymology/history of science, I find it very hard to consider it any kind of mistake or problem. It just becomes part of the overall tapestry of meanings.
1 Like
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
