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The Power of Naming

Language Log 2025-02-04

[This is a guest post by Conal Boyce]

Overview: Here we look at some technical terms and how they’ve fared since their release to, or adoption by, the public: information theory; (TW) the colored quarks of Nambu and Han; cosmic‑ray decay according to Millikan; the Sinitic languages (Mair) vs. ‘the Chinese language’ (misnomer); Wu’s cosmic chirality as the violation of a nonNoetherian principle.

① information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: “Shannon’s information theory.” In 1948, Shannon wrote a paper on the mathematics of data‑communication technology, and named it accordingly. Put off by its name, science journalists introduced it to the world as “information theory.” The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century, but it is accompanied by innumerable smaller cases, as when Susskind argues that “in physics we treat them as pretty much the same thing” (paraphrase; details in Appendix A). Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable. Then, overheard by someone in the world at large, such casual usage is easily misconstrued, leading astrophysicists to fret in public over the “information” that might be “lost” in a black hole. (As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.)

② The quark: There has long been a disconnect between the public life of Gell‑Mann’s quark and its parallel life in the on‑going world of theory. Out in public, we see the quark ensconced in six of the 18 boxes of the Standard Model, as Up Down, Charm Strange, Truth Beauty. Meanwhile, back in the technical realm whence it came, it is ridiculed by some as emblematic of all that has gone wrong in physics, in both style and substance, post‑1970. (See Unzicker 2013, in Appendix A.)

It seems the quark has political worries, too, of late. Consider the book review found on pages 50‑51 in Physics Today, January 2022. In a show of solidarity with the book’s author, the reviewer laments the practice of (TW) calling quarks colored since “that word has a loaded, racialized meaning.” The reviewer informs us that in one’s native Turkish, the adjective renkli, “which literally means ‘colorful,’ is used to describe such particles,” and that’s nicer. The reviewer asserts that the individuals who coined the terminology were “surely aware” of its racial hurtfulness. Well, at least half the physicists I knew (growing up in Old Berkeley of the 1950s) were silly and whimsical, while the other half were withdrawn and erudite, unaware of the world. So this racial hurtfulness accusation does not ring true to me. It’s tantamount to saying, “Although I have the credentials to teach physics, I have never been in the room with real physicists. Still, I can intuit what they’re like.” Really? Let’s see how and why the colors made their debut. They were introduced in 1965 by 南部陽一郎 and 한무영, apparently not of the presumed Dead White Men stock. By introducing colors (red‑yellow‑blue, later changed to red‑blue‑green), Nambu and Han “provided an extra degree of freedom which one could use to antisymmetrise an otherwise symmetric quark wave‑function, and thus made it possible to reconcile the symmetry of the spatial wave‑functions of the low‑lying baryons with the overall antisymmetry required by the Exclusion Principle.” Right. And in their wildest dreams could they have foreseen that 57 years hence, their whimsied but apposite innovation would be publicly shamed by some for sneaking “loaded racialized” hurtfulness into the physics classroom?

③ cosmic-ray decay, and Millikan’s descent into madness: Physicists like to say that particles decay into one another. What this really means is that they are transformed into one another (but that’s awkward to say) or that they give birth to one another (but that doesn’t sound science‑y), hence the argot term, decay. Usually, this usage is a problem only for those of us outside the field. For example, one of us might wonder: “Why do physicists say that a neutron sitting in dumb isolation, with a lifespan of only 14 minutes, decays into a proton, electron and [anti]neutrino (n → p + e– + ῡe), when s/he knows that each of these three brand‑new particles will likely enjoy a lifetime that is eternal as they go on to perform useful ‘jobs’ all through the cosmos?”

“Well, it’s a bit of jargon, you see, a façon de parler. Don’t fret.”

But Millikan did fret. And that might make his case unique, for here we have a physics insider — Nobel laureate and long‑time head of Caltech, no less — flailing in the quicksand of his own field’s jargon, as he worried himself sick over the scrambled up technical meaning and Webster’s gloss of ‘decay,’ just as one of us might. Subsequent to his prize in 1923, the word decay was instrumental in causing him to suffer 30 years of derangement over the question of whether decay plays a role in cosmic‑ray showers (the name ‘cosmic ray’ itself having been his own coinage, by the way, in 1925). He claimed that cosmic rays had nothing to do with matter being destroyed; rather, they must be the “Birth Cries” of matter being created. (Sparks from God’s Workbench, if you will.) Yes, mad as a hatter, but his name emerges no worse for the wear. All chemistry and physics textbooks feature his exquisitely clever method of measuring the elementary charge, which he found, via his 1909‑1913 oil‑drop experiments, to be 1.592×10-19 coulombs — which is astonishingly close to today’s reference value. The textbook authors politely ignore (or know nothing of?) the thirty years of his life that followed the Nobel in 1923. All the way to his death in 1953, against ever‑mounting evidence to the contrary, he never loosed his grip on his Birth Cries rosary. Truly, as Chabrol once said, L’intelligence, elle, a ses limites tandis que la bêtise n’en a pas. (See notes on bêtise = ‘folly’ in Appendix A).

④ the Sinitic languages and “the imperceptible psychological pressure of ‘politicolinguistics’ ” to stick with ‘The Chinese language.’ The latter is a misnomer that needs to be replaced by ‘the Sinitic languages,’ a term that fits the geographic breadth and chronological depth of all the entities at play. Mair’s promotion of that term is very welcome to anyone who has approached, say, Mĭn 閩 or Wú 吳 close enough to note the wonderfully deep gorges that hold them both separate from MSM. (For those unfamiliar with these three languages, the sounds of Mĭn are earthy or chocolatey while the sounds of Wú (in certain topolects) seem to float like iridescent dust that was blown off a butterfly’s wing. Meanwhile, MSM evokes a Sunday school class conducted in an attic with no air conditioning.) Further food for thought: “[E]ven Mandarin includes within it an unspecified number of languages, very few of which have ever been reduced to writing, that are mutually unintelligible[!]”

So, with ‘the Sinitic languages’ and topolects, we have terms that are at once technical and ready to cross the threshold into the general population. Even eager to cross. But there has been resistance:

Chinese scholars have repeatedly and confidentially told me on many occasions that Hanyu — on purely linguistic grounds alone — really ought to be considered as a group (yŭzŭ 語組), but that there are ‘traditional’, ‘political’, ‘nationalistic’ and other factors that prevent them from declaring this publicly. These concerns may be temporarily unavoidable inside China, but it is regrettable that they are also still being purveyed in purportedly authoritative treatments of language intended for external consumption.

That was written in 1991. Are the political and scholarly landscapes much different now, in 2025? Let’s see in the LL comments.

⑤ ‘observation of chirality’ contrasted with ‘violation of a symmetry’: In this final section, in addition to deciphering some technical terms I will also challenge how those terms were employed to report the results of an experiment that was designed and conducted in 1957‑1958 by Chien‑Shiung Wu (Wú Jiànxióng 吳健雄) and her NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) team. First, here is a commonsense reaction to her experiment: Her team obtained the following positive result: They demonstrated that it is not just certain local molecules that possess chirality but the Universe itself has chirality in some areas, at least in its mode of birthing electrons and antineutrinos. But in the argot of the physics establishment, the Wu experiment is described exclusively as something negative. Her experiment had uncovered an unwanted violation, a nonobservation of parity symmetry (which latter is something held sacred by the Establishment). Parity symmetry then had to be rescued and made safe from this apparent violation. Two decades of fancy accounting tricks put the issue to bed.

But, as an outsider, I feel compelled to ask: just how sacred is this thing called parity symmetry? Here we need to add some context: There are two very different kinds of symmetries in particle physics, the continuous symmetries, which are those of Emmy Noether (so I call them Noetherian), and the discrete symmetries, which I call non‑Noetherian. Now the one that was violated by the Wu experiment was parity symmetry, which is one of the discrete or non‑Noetherian symmetries. As such, parity symmetry is, in my view, only wannabe sacred, not diamond‑hard sacred by virtue of Noether genealogy. Or, look at the story in this most straightforward manner: If the Universe tells earthlings that their parity symmetry has been “violated,” then so be it; one should not spend time arguing with the Universe to say, “No, Universe, our parity symmetry is sacred. On this one, we’re right and you’re wrong.”

Not by design but as a side‑effect, the campaign to save parity symmetry caused the name 吳健雄 to recede little by little into the mists of history. Someday that name will be moved back into the limelight where it belongs, but for now it remains stuck in the ghetto‑like region of Women‑Scientists of Note, ancillary to theorists T.D. Lee 李政道 and C.N. Yang 楊振寧, who got the Nobel for conjuring the slight possibility of the chirality that Wu’s team demonstrated.

 

Appendix A: Sources and Notes

① information theory: See Shannon’s The Mathematical Theory of Communication, 1948, second paragraph: “These semantic aspects of communication are irrelevant to the engineering problem” (emphasis added). The journalists’ neglect of this ‘no‑semantics!’ warning is not the only problem. The jargon in section 6 is a never-ending source of confusion. There, Shannon uses the term information source but this does not denote actual information; rather, it is shop‑talk for: the lexicon in question and what degree of encoding‑richness it will require of us.

In 1957, Leonard Meyer wrote “Meaning in Music and Information Theory” (J. of Aesthetics and Art Criticism), the sort of intellectual showpiece that makes some people roll their eyes at the Liberal Arts generally. Fortunately, by 1967 he had paid his dues to the Shannon zeitgeist and now wrote an extremely valuable book in which he peered far into the future and predicted accurately the state of the arts today. (But the 1967 book begins with a reprint of 1957…)

The data/information vocabulary problem. L. Susskind, S. Lloyd et al. “The Physics of Information: From Entanglement to Black Holes,” at Perimeter Institute, 12‑5‑07, @1:15:28‑1:15:53, in responding to an audience member who points out that a bath’s temperature is data while its being ‘hot’ is information, Susskind becomes defensive about his entropy analogy on the whiteboard and provides this nonresponse: “Well [we physicists] think of data and information as being largely the same thing.”

Hossenfelder, “The Black Hole Information Loss Problem [BHILP] is Unsolved. And unsolvable.” Youtube, 11-18-2020, ID mqLM3JYUByM. @3:57 “[The BHILP] has actually nothing to do with information [rather, with the breakdown of our time‑reversal assumption, which would play out in the realm of data].”

Toward an actual Theory of Information: For a glimpse of how challenging the task would be, see The Chemistry Redemption (2010), Appendix E (pp. 299‑384) which outlines some of the desiderata for a true Theory of Information. (By the way, the feeding‑frenzy of Big Data Analytics is only tangentially related to all of this. A drop in the bucket.)

② The quark. For a different perspective on the Standard Model, see Unzicker, The Higgs Fake (2013) pp. 86, 89, and 104, where he eviscerates Gell‑Mann’s quark and Eightfold Way. As for color, that was introduced in 1965 by 南部陽一郎 (Yoichiro Nambu, 1921‑2015) and 한무영 (Moo‑Young Han, 1934‑2016):

Sources: O. W. Greenberg, “The Origin of Quark Color,” Physics Today, January 2015, pp. 33‑37. Pickering, Constructing Quarks (1984), pp. 215-224, especially pp. 216‑219.

More about renkli: ‘colorful quark’ = renkli kuark, but ‘colored quark’ likewise = renkli kuark. And if we turn it around, renkli kuark translates only to ‘colored quark,’ not to the desired phrase, ‘colorful quark.’ Meanwhile, rengarenk actually does mean ‘colorful,’ so (if I cared) I would vote for rengarenk kuarklar to express ‘colorful quarks.’ Sources: dictionary.cambridge.org/us/translate; tureng.com/en/english-turkish; Google Translate. Meanwhile, what one should be concerned with (instead friendly Turkish) is the semantics of it all: quarks are not colorful; they are colored (one of three colors, depending on context). This is the overarching semantic reality of the situation, and it is nonnegotiable.

③ cosmic‑ray decay: “There were two ways [the ultra‑high energy of cosmic rays might come about]: either heavy atoms were decaying and releasing protons and electrons as they transformed into lighter elements, or light atoms were fusing with other light atoms to form heavier elements, releasing gamma radiation as they did so. In other words, only two things would produce such energetic rays: the decay of matter or the creation of it. Millikan was religiously committed to the latter view” [i.e., the cosmic rays must be made of photons, not protons]. Monk, Robert Oppenheimer (2012) p. 185, emphasis added. Another account of Millikan’s descent into madness is found in Crease/Mann, The Second Creation (1996), pp. 150‑155; theirs is brutal. For an account that seems to read sympathetically to Millikan (though not really), see Peter Galison’s Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “How Experiments End […],” Harvard University 1983, Chapter III, pp. 119‑207.

For the history of an event called ‘decay’ being recognized, after three decades, as particle creation (by Fermi, in 1934), see Ford, The World of Elementary Particles ( 1963), p. 8. See also Sutton, Spaceship Neutrino (1992), pp. 25 and 28: “Dmitrij Iwanenko […] commented that ‘the expulsion of a beta electron [is] like the birth of a new particle’.”

Millikan’s oil‑drop experiment: For a glimpse of its difficult nature, see Fishbane et al. Physics for Scientists and Engineers (1993), II:697‑698, problem 53: The charge is given by q = {[18p (v0–v1)]/E}√v0h3/2rgù This equation is summarized in Giancoli, Physics (2005), II:756, as: q = (mdrg)/E.

Chabrol. Asked why so many of his films feature unpleasant people doing foolish things, Chabrol once quipped, “Intelligence has its limits but folly has none.” Or, in the original: L’intelligence, elle, a ses limites tandis que la bêtise n’en a pas. (In English, his word bêtise is usually rendered incorrectly as stupidity, which is the first dictionary gloss. In this context, bêtise must be rendered as folly, which is another one of its dictionary definitions. Otherwise, the saying would be a bore and would have long since fallen into oblivion: It’s precisely its focus on folly, not stupidity, that makes it shine.)

Some expected particle lifespans that one might well call eternal: 6.6×1028 years for the electron (now trending as “66,000 yottayears”); 6.6×1033 years for the proton. And so on.

④ the Sinitic languages as replacement for the misnomer ‘the Chinese language’: see Mair, “The Classification of Sinitic Languages: What is ‘Chinese’?” on Semantic Scholar (2013). See also LL 1211, “Mutual Intelligibility of Sinitic Languages,” which references Sino‑Platonic Papers 29 (1991). In this order, I quote passages from SPP 29: p. 26n26 (for politicolinguistics); p. 18n4 (for “even Mandarin…”); p. 10 (full paragraph about yŭzŭ 語組).

⑤ chirality vs. symmetry. The process in question here is closely related to n → p + e– + ῡe for an isolated neutron, as seen in ③ above, now with the neutron, n, inside a cobalt nucleus which turns into a nickel nucleus when n becomes p: 27Co60 → 28Ni60 + e– + ῡe. After Sutton 1992, pp. 46‑49. Ford 1963, pp. 224‑227.

As for the reported chirality: That can be described in terms of electrons emerging preferentially from the notional “South Poles” of the cobalt nuclei instead of randomly from either “Pole.” (This is the short version, sans spin and mirrors.)

Example of the accounting method used to bury Wu’s “violation of parity”: Let’s say the goal is for all nations to maintain a Flat Profile, since this fosters world peace. Problem: the US is known to have stolen land from the Native Americans; not a good look. Solution: Note that the US also went to the moon, which is something positive. Now, when we add Plus One to Minus One the sum is Zero. Thus, the US is shown scientifically to have the desired Flat Profile, which fosters world peace. “Nothing to see here.”

Goldberg, The Universe in the Rearview Mirror (2014) pp. 295‑296: discrete symmetries and continuous [Noetherian] symmetries.

Wu, C.S., Ambler, E., Hayward, R., Hoppes, D., Hudson, R. (1957). “Experimental Test of Parity Conservation in Beta Decay,” Phys. Rev. 105, 1413‑1415.

 

Selected readings