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Not sure how to do it?
Terms that Physicists use:
Order of Magnitude: Use terms like “orders of magnitude” to describe significant differences of scale.
Negligible: When something is small, say it is “negligible” non-zero, but negligible.
Infinitesimal: If it is really really small, say it is infinitesimal.
Non-trivial: For a physicist, nothing is ever hard or difficult - it is always “non-trivial”
First-order approximation: That is only a first-order approximation to a good cup of coffee… “The living room is clean. Well…at least to a first order approximation.”
Canonical: Use “canonical” when you mean “usual” or “standard.” As in, “the canonical example of talking like a physicist is to use the word ‘canonical.’”
Orthogonal: Use “orthogonal” to refer to things that are mutually-exclusive or can’t coincide. “We keep playing phone tag — I think our schedules must be orthogonal”
Empirical Data: Any actual personal experience becomes “empirical data.” i.e. a burn on your hand is empirical data that the stove is hot.
Ground State: You’re not being lazy, you are in your ground state.
Extrapolation: A semi-educated guess is an extrapolation
Ideal Case: You aren’t ignoring details, you are taking the ideal case
Vanishingly small: A tiny amount is “vanishingly small” or “negligible.” Really small is “infinitesimal”
Potential Well: Stuck in a meeting is “trapped in a potential well,” though you hope you can “tunnel out.”
Blackhole: If there is no escape, you are trapped by a black hole, from which there is no escape.
Photons: It’s not light, they are photons. Turning on the lamp becomes emitting photons.
Exercise to Reader: The rest is history becomes “the rest is left as an exercise to the reader…”
Not even wrong: Someone is making an argument using assumptions that are known to be wrong, or are making an argument that can’t be falsified. Courtesy Wolfgang Pauli. “Wait, he’s assuming Ron Paul can still win the Republican nomination? That’s not even wrong.”
For very small values of: This one, I’m afraid, I can best explain by example. “So there are four of us going to dinner.” “Three.” “Okay, so there are four of us for very small values of four.”
Super position: If something seems to act like something else, I say that it’s in a “superposition of the two states”.
Other good words to add to your vocabulary:
- Discontinuity
- Renormalize
- Positive and negative work
- God Particle
- Dark Energy
- Space-time continuum
Other rules:
When you are asked a question, think of improbable ways a statement could be true and then at the end make sure to give correct answer.
For Example:
When a mere mortal is asked a question “Can a pig fly?” typically the answerer is “No.” However a physicist will respond as follows: “They could if there was no gravity, or in interstellar space, or if they had wings, or if they were dropped off a cliff (though it would be a short flight). Generally the answer is NO.”
Here is another example of the same rule:
Q: two trains are a approaching each other at 40 mph and are 8 miles apart, when will they cross each other? An untrained person would say “in about 6 minutes”.
A physicist would respond as:
"If the trains are on the same track, they will not cross each other but run in to each other; when you say approaching each other, are the trains engines facing each other? they could go around the world and then cross each other, but for that I need to know the location of the trains. Also, I need to know the lengths of each of the trains to accurately calculate this, but in a trivially simple situation, the trains will cross each other in 6 minutes. "
Again, make sure that the correct answer is always present at the end.
Still confused? This should simplify things for you:
And here's a diagram of the above information:
But wait, there's more! It's a physicist rap!!
And that's not all! I even found a lecture on on Quantum Physics by Prof.V.Balakrishnan, Department of Physics, IIT Madras. Watch and learn!!
Thanks to Sean, JerseyBoy, Swans on tea, dr. Dev. Stephan at Live granades, James Cronen and many others who have commented on various blogs on this issue.
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