4 ms·
Physicist use this term, but always with the understanding of "communication" in the sense of Shannon information, i.e., two initially uncorrelated systems can
by jessriedel 7y ago
Physicist use this term, but always with the understanding of "communication" in the sense of Shannon information, i.e., two initially uncorrelated systems can become correlated only if they "talk" to each other. It's never intended to suggest planning/agency, and it's a useful intuition pump, properly used.
What's happening here is that the journalist is keying on that phrase used by physicists and repeating it in a popular setting where the reader doesn't know the more precise meaning. It functions as effective clickbait, but the journalist can maintain plausible deniability by quoting the researcher. (Sometimes, the physicists is guilty of doing this purposefully and the journalist is duped.) This is actually a pretty big source of popular-physics clickbait.
- xhkkffbf 7y agoThat's because that's about the level of "communication" that most physicists can manage with other humans. Sorry. It's a lazy dunk. And an unfair one. But when someone tosses it up, I need to slam home the lob.
- thdrdt 7y agoBut why not use the word 'interact' instead?
- jessriedel 7y agoIf I were to speculate, and say it's probably because (1) they might not be interacting directly, and saying "(possibly indirectly) interacting" is a lot more syllables than "talking"; and (2) "talk"/"communicate" emphasizes the information-theoretic content, whereas "interact" is somewhat more likely to be interpreted in terms of interaction strength. (If two systems are "barely communicating", they are transferring a small number of bits, whereas if two systems are "barely interacting", the influence in displacement/impulse/temp/whatever is small.)
- asdfman123 7y agoShannon's original paper was "A Mathematical Theory of Communication," which actually studied radio communication, it's since been generalized, and there's no reason to rename jargon so outsiders can better understand it.
- eric190 7y agoIt was actually "The mathematical Theory of Communication," where communication was studied over any channel not just radio. The paper(s) revolutionized several fields!