Yahoo News featured an interesting short report issued by Agence France-Presse on November 20. In it we discover that a consortium of French, German and Hungarian mathematicians are claiming to have proven that Einstein's famous equation, e=mc2, is correct. The report is all good except for one very small aspect. They call the effort of these mathematicians "heroic" in contradiction to the root meaning of the word. Mathematics isn't "heroic" and it is a degradation of true heroics to say it is.Whatever. Of course, here's a definition of "heroic" according to the OED:
Unfortunately, while a small thing too casually used in the AFP report, it proves a sort of degradation of our language. Not only that, but it further devalues real heroism, making the word mean less with each garbled usage.
Having recourse to bold, daring, or extreme measures; boldly experimental; attempting great things.
Seems to fit in the usage of the quoted description just fine. And this wasn't a usage invented for the pure pleasure of liberal mathematicians at the expense of freedom-loving conservative, "real" Americans. This is a description that has been used for at least as long as I have been doing science, and likely as long as the word "heroic" has been in use. Again, the OED provides context:
1664 POWER Exp. Philos. 191 'Tis a Noble resolution to begin there where all the world has ended; and an Heroick attempt to solve those difficulties.
Yes, that's right. 1664. So, seriously, along with their dependence on the oogedy-boogedies, they need to stop with the psuedo-intellectualism if they want any more cred.
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Are we splitting hairs here or what?
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDelete"We" are not the ones splitting the hairs. Newsbusters are. Must have been a slow news day. And they were ripe for being set straight.
ReplyDeleteSorry, but make fun of mathematicians on this site at your peril...
LOL that is true, they hit your weak spot. i guess they deserve a shot.
ReplyDeleteI just watched "Einstein" on the History channel. There are some true heroics on how Einstein had to gather the resources to take himself, a relatively (ahem) unknown scientist, and a young upstart astronomer, who was one of the very few who believed in him, halfway across Russia in order to prove in practical terms his general theory of relativity by observing a full solar eclipse (i.e. gravitational lensing).
ReplyDeleteOf course, we'll conveniently ignore the fact that he wrote dirty letters to his first cousin (yikes!).
Hey Matt, nice blog yourself, BTW.
ReplyDeleteAt the risk of going off tangentially from the original topic, how unknown was Einstein? At the time of that experiment, I think he was within 3-4 years of a Nobel, no? I didn't see the program you mention, so I could be wrong. He may have been unknown to the general public, but not the physics community.
And yes, that experimental validation was key to his deification. You don;t take a 300-year-old picture of the universe, throw it away, and have nature call you right on without some heroism in there. (I also dig the prediction of the perhelion shift of Mercury's solar orbit.)