It’s Talk Like a Physicist Day!

I gave a rather extended vocabulary list last year, and used a lot of those terms. A few more that I’ve used in the last year:

I mentioned a quantum, to mean a small amount, as in “take that with a quantum of salt”

I used “collapse the wave function” to denote resolving something, as in “the election collapsed the presidential race wave function”

resonated — already in common use

a short amount of time became “a small delta-t”

a wide variety of something I called a spectrum

I refer to a rumor (aka nebulous information) as “Nth-hand information”

I didn’t forget, I “expunged this from the buffer”

An either/or situation is a Boolean state

Happy New Year’s Day was “Happy return to an arbitrarily chosen starting point in the orbit about our gravitational enslaver”

When something came close to me, it was at perigee

And of course, the blogging community is called the blogohedron

I also like making up measuring devices, like the cringe-o-meter to measure how painful something looks, or the Geekmeter. “Pegging the Geekmeter” is a large signal, and means you’re in a maximal “Talk Like a Physicist” state.

Made-up “elements” I’ve used in the last year

Politicium
Grinchonium
Quiltonium
Elephantium
Nerdonium

And some new vocabulary and ways to use it:

Incompatible things are “out of phase.” “Pi out of phase” is the ultimate in being out-of-step, which leads to destructive interference.

Something that is close is “within epsilon”

We physicists quantify relationships — something that is complicated is “nonlinear,” or even “highly nonlinear.” Opposites are “inversely proportional”

Two different things happening at once can be said to be in a superposition (That’s a superposition of painful and funny!)

If something doesn’t happen, you can say the wave functions just didn’t overlap

It’s not unclear, it’s opaque

A situation that’s impossible to resolve has overconstrained boundary conditions

It’s not a hill/ditch, it’s local maximum/minimum