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This is silly, and I wish I had enough points to downvote you. Mathematicians borrow the terminology that is most helpful for explaining an idea. such a thing

This is silly, and I wish I had enough points to downvote you. Mathematicians borrow the terminology that is most helpful for explaining an idea. such a thing cannot be seen as harmful. Readers are not infants, and should not be treated like infants. They are responsible for the conclusions they come to, especially in mathematics.

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
> especially in mathematics What do you mean?
- Gollapalli 6y ago
  Mathematics is one of those fields where you can actually, really verify the truth or falseness of a statement, if you're willing to do the work involved.
  - jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
    That does not make sense within the context of the discussion. In any science, engineering, etc. field you are responsible for the conclusions you come in your papers/projects/etc. Even in sub-fields of those with an empirical component (if that is your angle) there are standards you have to reach to claim a discovery/success.
lisper 6y ago
Quanta is targeted at a lay audience so many of the people who read it can reasonably be called "infants" in terms of their mathematical and technical knowledge. Furthermore, Quanta often has articles about quantum mechanics, a field where misinformation is rampant and leads in some cases to actual substantial harm. Also, there is nothing wrong with appropriating terminology -- when it is appropriate (no pun intended). But, to quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all, it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." The phrase "measure a repulsive force" has an established meaning in English, and that meaning is intimately bound to the physical world. There is nothing wrong with using that physical phenomenon as a metaphor, but that's not what the headline does. The headline says "Mathematician Measures the Repulsive Force Within Polynomials" and that is simply false under the well-established English semantics of the phrase "measure a ... force." No mathematician has ever measured a force, at least not in the course of conducting the business of being a mathematician.
- klyrs 6y ago
  > No mathematician has ever measured a force, at least not in the course of conducting the business of being a mathematician. Read the histories of Liebnitz and Newton. You are grossly misinformed about both mathematics and physics.
  - lisper 6y ago
    I would say that when Newton and Leibniz measured forces they were acting as (experiental) physicists, not mathematicians. What instrument does one use to "measure the repulsive force within polynomials"? In what units are the results expressed? Can this force be used to do useful work? Does this force obey Newton's first law?
    - klyrs 6y ago
      > I would say that when Newton and Leibniz measured forces they were acting as (experiental) physicists, not mathematicians. Which gave them the requisite experience to invent calculus to more accurately describe those physical forces. Which ends up being wrong because the universe isn't diffenentiable, after all. Did their imperfect analogies between differentiable functions and physical forces do HARM or did they advance the fields of math and physics by leaps and bounds? In short, your hard delineation between math and physics is ahistorical at best and doesn't even model present-day research in either field.
      - lisper 6y ago
        I see I have failed to make myself clear. It is not that I don't appreciate the intimate relationship between physics and math. The problem here is not that the article uses an analogy, the problem is that the article does not make it clear that it is an analogy. The words of the article taken at face value say that mathematicians literally measured a repulsive force between polynomials. They did not because no such repulsive force exists. (There is an additional problem, which is that the analogy being used is a bad analogy. Forces cause things to move in accordance with Newton's first law. But these alleged "repulsive forces between polynomials" don't cause anything to move. Indeed, the whole concept of a polynomial being "moved" by a "repulsive force" is non-sensical. Only things that occupy locations in physical space can be moved by forces.)

jfkebwjsbx 6y ago

> especially in mathematics What do you mean?

Gollapalli 6y ago
Mathematics is one of those fields where you can actually, really verify the truth or falseness of a statement, if you're willing to do the work involved.
- jfkebwjsbx 6y ago
  That does not make sense within the context of the discussion. In any science, engineering, etc. field you are responsible for the conclusions you come in your papers/projects/etc. Even in sub-fields of those with an empirical component (if that is your angle) there are standards you have to reach to claim a discovery/success.

lisper 6y ago

Quanta is targeted at a lay audience so many of the people who read it can reasonably be called "infants" in terms of their mathematical and technical knowledge. Furthermore, Quanta often has articles about quantum mechanics, a field where misinformation is rampant and leads in some cases to actual substantial harm. Also, there is nothing wrong with appropriating terminology -- when it is appropriate (no pun intended). But, to quote Tom Stoppard, "If there is any point to using language at all, it is that a word is taken to stand for a particular fact or idea and not for other facts or ideas." The phrase "measure a repulsive force" has an established meaning in English, and that meaning is intimately bound to the physical world. There is nothing wrong with using that physical phenomenon as a metaphor, but that's not what the headline does. The headline says "Mathematician Measures the Repulsive Force Within Polynomials" and that is simply false under the well-established English semantics of the phrase "measure a ... force." No mathematician has ever measured a force, at least not in the course of conducting the business of being a mathematician.

klyrs 6y ago
> No mathematician has ever measured a force, at least not in the course of conducting the business of being a mathematician. Read the histories of Liebnitz and Newton. You are grossly misinformed about both mathematics and physics.
- lisper 6y ago
  I would say that when Newton and Leibniz measured forces they were acting as (experiental) physicists, not mathematicians. What instrument does one use to "measure the repulsive force within polynomials"? In what units are the results expressed? Can this force be used to do useful work? Does this force obey Newton's first law?
  - klyrs 6y ago
    > I would say that when Newton and Leibniz measured forces they were acting as (experiental) physicists, not mathematicians. Which gave them the requisite experience to invent calculus to more accurately describe those physical forces. Which ends up being wrong because the universe isn't diffenentiable, after all. Did their imperfect analogies between differentiable functions and physical forces do HARM or did they advance the fields of math and physics by leaps and bounds? In short, your hard delineation between math and physics is ahistorical at best and doesn't even model present-day research in either field.
    - lisper 6y ago
      I see I have failed to make myself clear. It is not that I don't appreciate the intimate relationship between physics and math. The problem here is not that the article uses an analogy, the problem is that the article does not make it clear that it is an analogy. The words of the article taken at face value say that mathematicians literally measured a repulsive force between polynomials. They did not because no such repulsive force exists. (There is an additional problem, which is that the analogy being used is a bad analogy. Forces cause things to move in accordance with Newton's first law. But these alleged "repulsive forces between polynomials" don't cause anything to move. Indeed, the whole concept of a polynomial being "moved" by a "repulsive force" is non-sensical. Only things that occupy locations in physical space can be moved by forces.)