More bad uses of scientific language

George Boole

To continue with the previous post, I’ll add here a few more cases of bad translations between English and Spanish, many of them due to the existence of false friends between those languages. In other cases, the English word is used as-is, although there is a Spanish word that can be used instead.

Bad uses of scientific language

Journalists and scientists perpetrate sometimes abuses of scientific language. In this post, I’ll mention a few.

·      Heard on the radio news: Meteorology is to blame for the spread of this fire. I suppose we must sue the meteorologists. According to Wikipedia, Meteorology is the scientific study of the Earth's atmosphere and short-term atmospheric phenomena (i.e. weather), with a focus on weather forecasting. Apparently, saying that excessive heat or dryness is to blame for the spread of the fire is too vulgar, and the news needs to be phrased in a more scientific way.

·     DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) is a molecule that contains the genetic information of living beings. The idea of ​​identifying it with the properties that define a different entity, such as a cultural construct or a society, is an ingenious metaphor, but through overuse and repetition it becomes hackneyed. We hear frequently about the DNA of a football club, or the DNA of a company, or the DNA of the work of an artist.

·      A variation on the previous case consists of using the word genome instead of DNA with the same meaning, as in this example, which appeared in an article in the Spanish newspaper El País with the following headline: The household genome: the new consumer battle is fought at home.

Daring to say “I don’t know”

I don’t know. It seems quite simple. Why so few people dare to say it?

Several years ago, when it became fashionable in popular newspapers to publish mini-surveys, answered by four or five people, about a current issue, I wondered at seeing that, whatever the question, not one of them ever answered I don’t know. Everyone was perfectly clear about what they should answer in every case.

Some of the questions had substance:

• How would you end the civil war in Yugoslavia?
• How would you solve the unemployment problem?
• How would you stop terrorism?

Is scientific research well done?

Tabby Cat
Oliver-Bonjoch, CC BY-SA 3.0

Sometimes, while reading items published by journals such as Science News, it looks like some research currently being carried out is platitudinous. Either it leads to the discovery of things everyone knows, or time and efforts are spent to investigate in fields that no one cares about. We know that many researchers are anxious to publish, and they must justify somewhat the funds they receive, but up to that point?

Let’s look at a very recent news (April 2019):

Cats recognize their name. A study suggests our feline friends can tell the familiar sound of their name from other words. A paragraph of this news adds: As for whether or not a cat understands what a name is, well, only the cat knows that.

Anyone who has had a cat (I had one half a century ago) knows that cats recognize their name. Was it necessary to do a research about this, probably spending public money, to discover something that everyone knows?

Is Physics science or literature?

Freeman Dyson, who proposed a way
to extract energy from stars

We usually assume that physics is the most rigorous of the experimental sciences, the closest to mathematics, which serve as the fundamental basis for all sciences. However, some recent developments raise doubts about this. In other articles I have spoken of a few: the theories of the multiverse, time travel, that usually provide appealing headers in the media, but cannot be considered scientific theories, not because they cannot be verified, but because they cannot be proved false.

A recent article published in the high-profile journal Science News can be classified within this group, and in my opinion adds fuel to the fire, endangering the prestige of physics as a rigorous science and turning it into science fiction literature. This publication refers to an article recently published in arXiv, whose title is quite indicative: Life versus Dark Energy: How an Advanced Civilization Could Resist the Accelerating Expansion of the Universe. This article has been classified in the category Cosmology and Nongalactic Astrophysics.

The mystery of the Cambrian explosion

Opabinia

550 million years ago, during the Cambrian period, animals appear suddenly in the fossil record. This spectacular phenomenon has been given the name of Cambrian explosion. Why did it happen then, and not before, has been, for over a century, one of the great mysteries of paleontology.

The evolution of life on Earth seems to have been rather discontinuous. Life is likely to have appeared 3,500 to 4,000 million years ago. Not much later, around 3,000 million years ago, photosynthesis appeared. Eukaryotes (cells with nuclei) emerged 2,000 million years ago. From then until the Cambrian explosion, nothing much seems to have happened for 1,500 million years. Then all the types of organization of the animals existing today appear suddenly. Why?

Atheist arguments are still in the nineteenth century while theists have modernized

Interview with Manuel Alfonseca published in http://www.religionenlibertad.com/los-ateos-siguen-con-argumentos-del-siglo-xix-pero-los-teistas-38204.htm

Manuel Alfonseca was born in Madrid in 1946. He is the son of the painter and sculptor Manuel Alfonseca (Santana), is a doctor in Telecommunication Engineering and a Computer Scientist, has been a full professor, and is currently a honorary professor at the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid. 

His great gift is his ability to popularize science and express himself clearly, which has led him, not only to teaching and science, but also to the literary world (he has published fantasy, science fiction and historical novels). His work makes a bridge between "science" and "humanities", attested in his blog on popular science and his personal website. Now, in addition, he is one of the co-editors (along with Francisco-José Soler-Gil) of an unusual work for its breadth and ease of comprehension: 60 preguntas sobre ciencia y fe respondidas por 26 profesores de universidad (60 questions on science and faith answered by 26 professors). Without getting into the 60 questions, we shall try to explore the science-faith dialogue with a few questions, while strongly recommending the book to those who seek answers to the others.

The origin of life in other worlds

In a recent article published in the Annals of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Christopher McKay analyzes the requirements and limits for life in other worlds. Since we have no data at all about any concrete planet outside the Solar System, and very few about the planets and satellites in our system, apart from the Earth, the study focuses on the limits for life in our world and tries to extrapolate the results to the possible existence of extraterrestrial life.

Thus, for instance, he notices that on Earth there are extremophile organisms, able to survive in environments apparently hostile for life: between -15 and 122ºC; in conditions of extreme dryness; in an almost total absence of light (100.000 times less than the solar flux we use to receive); in the presence of ultraviolet rays and ionizing radiation...