Growing up in the United States during the oil embargo in the early 1970s, I was inundated with public service announcements urging people to conserve energy. However, at a young age I also read that physics tells us that “energy is always conserved.” This puzzled me: if nature conserves energy automatically, why should humans make the effort to do so?
I quickly discovered that physicists don’t speak English at all. They use a dialect full of terms that sound familiar but don’t make sense (like “conservation” and “energy”). To make matters worse, many words, including simple words like “force” and “mass,” don’t mean what physicists originally intended. As a result, the language we use to talk about physics obscures some of the most beautiful and fascinating discoveries about how the universe works.
Some scientists might shrug and say that it’s neither surprising nor a problem that the words aren’t entirely clear: After all, physics is based on experiments and mathematics; they’re what matters, and words are necessarily just shadows of them.
We agree that data and equations are paramount, but physicists also use language to communicate their ideas, both to each other and to non-scientists, and if the language is vague or opaque, important lessons about the universe can be misunderstood.
So let’s take a closer look at the language of physics, and see how three seemingly simple words have changed over time to become traps for the unwary. Such misleading terms and metaphors are widespread in the language of physicists. If we stop and think…
