5 Atrocious Science Clichés to Throw Down a Black Hole
After careful consideration and consultation with members of the local science writing community (only some of them were drunk), we have selected the five most annoying and ubiquitous clichés we think should be sucked into a black hole, forever banished from all future descriptions of science.
Funny — I just saw “shedding light” in several headlines on my RSS feed before getting to this, and “shedding light on black holes” (ouch!) got me ~41k Google hits.
I’m surprised “quantum leap’ isn’t on the list. Quantum means discrete, not big, i.e. the opposite of quantum is continuum.
I’d also add “all heat and no light” because visible light from a blackbody is heat, and it can certainly be used to warm things up. Radiant energy is radiant energy. The problem here is that out experience is with “hot” things is at around 400K or so, where most of the blackbody radiation is in the infrared. So we equate infrared radiation with heat, and they just aren’t synonymous. You can be burned with focused visible light (ask an ant if you don’t believe me — oh, wait, you can’t: they’ve all been burned up). A microwave oven is another example of radiant energy transfer which doesn’t involve the infrared as the source.
Quantum does mean discrete, but it doesn’t have to be small, right? So, I think quantum leap is ok. It means to jump ahead and not take all the intermediate steps (although steps would also imply quantum).
Don’t get me started on the word heat. It’s a four letter word no matter how it is used in a phrase.
I never realized how stupid the phrase ‘shedding light’ is.