3 ms·
Goes to show how stupid the convention of naming scientific terms after people is. The name "Yakolevian Torque" is not at all descriptive of what the phenomenon
by knolax 7y ago
Goes to show how stupid the convention of naming scientific terms after people is. The name "Yakolevian Torque" is not at all descriptive of what the phenomenon is, is hard to spell, and is hard to pronounce. You could say that it's to honor the discoverer but for a natural phenomenon does it really matter who discovered it first given that its a property of reality itself that holds true regardless of who discovered it.
Besides that, many such phenomenon by their nature are discovered simultaneously by multiple people, making their naming by this convention a point of unnecessary political contention.
Naming scientific terms after people also creates an unnecessary barrier to international collaboration. Although scientific terms are usually the most easy terms to translate given the universality of the topic on hand, proper names are usually the most difficult to translate terms from any given language to any other language due to their lack of semantic meaning and therefore the requirement for transliteration, which in most cases is a lossy process. For any given language and English, there are often many different transliteration schemes, making it difficult for even someone who speaks both languages to find the spelling that has been converged upon in English.
The previous point basically nullifies any notion that naming a scientific term after a person honors that person, since it is very likely that it results in their name being butchered across multiple languages, often in egregious ways bordering on offensive.
- blueprint 7y agoWell, it's not strictly a bad idea to name it by some unique name if it turns out to be the case that another, better, more rigorous theory or set of observations is developed about the cause and range/extent of morphologies associated with the torque that makes the concept of Yakolevian Torque obsolete.
- knolax 7y agoIf the concept of Yakolevian Torque becomes obselete we'll just stop referring to it regardless of how it's named. If it only needs to be updated in a way that obseletes the older descriptional name we can just give it a newer more apt descriptional name.
- blueprint 7y agoKind of like Newtonian mechanics?
- knolax 7y agoYou mean Classical Mechanics? Plus your example doesn't make sense because the term "Newtonian Mechanics" was likely coined only after Relativistic Mechanics were discovered[0][1], Newton himself referred to it as "Natural Philosophy". In addition "Newtonian Mechanics" isn't even the preferred name, Wikipedia refers to it as "Classical Mechanics"[2] while the Webster's definition of "Newtonian Mechanics"[3] is just the words "Classical Mechanics", which themselves have a much longer entry[4]. The fact that we do not in fact refer to "Classical Mechanics" as "Philosophiae Naturalis" actually supports my point: as our understanding of Physics improved we renamed the field, with older concepts/terms falling out of use and being renamed when they are reused. [0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mechanics&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0#t1%3B%2CNewtonian%20Mechanics%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Newtonian+Mech... [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philosophy&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CNatural%20Philosophy%3B%2Cc0 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Natural+Philos... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechanics&redirect=no https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Newtonian_Mechani... [3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mechanics https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/Newtonian%20mecha... [4] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mechanics https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/classical%20mecha...
- blueprint 7y agoCrazy how you knew exactly what I was talking about.
- knolax 7y agoCan you elaborate? I'm not sure what you're getting at. I never claimed that you can't use an arbitrary name to convey information. You can call it Classical Mechanics "gleeebnok" and people will understand you long as they can look up "gleeebnok" but that doesn't mean it's not a dumb name.