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YouTube recommended that I rewatch Weird Al’s The Saga Begins:
I’m struck by how straightforwardly positive and joyous the video is. Look at the aliens dancing in the cantina! Maybe that was the last time Star Wars culture was happy.
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Angela Collier has an almost four-hour video on Star Trek: Picard (though only two hours at double speed); one senses the influence of Jenny Nicholson. I haven’t seen Picard, but no matter. One thing Collier stresses is that – I’m simplifying – TNG had a fundamentally positive vision of the future, something that’s been lost since the franchise’s 2009 reboot.
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I’ve been binging Collier’s channel lately, more for the physics than for the sci-fi. It’s been a long time since I’ve been surrounded by physicists and physics students, and there’s a comforting familiarity to the style of explanation that I don’t feel when reading about economics or geology.
One thing I appreciate is that she doesn’t let you forget for too long that you need to do maths to properly understand the physics. I don’t know how I feel about popular accounts of physics. It’s a key early exposure to the subject for many of us, and if it inspires people to study it more deeply in high school and university, then in some sense it has worked, and has had a positive influence on society.1
But the risk is that people read the pop sci books, free of equations, and think that they now have some understanding of the subject. They have no such thing. I remember2 when I was at UQ, an ambitious high school student emailed one of the professors, asking for— I can’t remember exactly, let’s say it was a summer research project. The kid was keen, and also honest: he admitted that he had only a limited understanding of quantum mechanics, general relativity, black holes, and string theory.
Limited! I’m not sure I’d claim to have had a limited understanding of general relativity even after getting a 7 in it in fourth year – I got pretty good at manipulating indices, all those tensors and Christoffel symbols, but it was mostly just pattern matching, good enough to solve exam questions. My experience of university physics was that each year I’d expect to finally learn some physics, only to have my eyes opened to the existence of vast areas of which I knew nothing, my undergrad lectures just taking the first few steps down these paths.
Collier has an entertaining video titled “why you can’t explain qcd”. At least it was entertaining for me, someone who crammed for 12 solid days for a quantum field theory exam in 2004 and forgot everything shortly afterwards. But, you know, for a brief time I was conversant with propagators and Feynman diagrams, all that good stuff, and several of us wondered if we should make a serious effort at reading the later chapters of Peskin and Schroeder to learn QCD. It never happened.
As the credits roll, she says, “So how did this go? Do you feel like you know what QCD is now even though, like, I didn’t say the word gauge invariance?” And that was a lightning bolt. You got me! I’d just spent half of 36 minutes feeling like I understood a bit about why QCD was too hard, and I’d forgotten, despite Collier’s repeated comments about how hard all the maths in the background was, even the very basics. I had no understanding at all; instead what I’d learned was a series of facts that could be connected only with a lot of work, and I appreciated the brutal reminder at the end of the video.
Facts can be fun. Sometimes you can even get some understanding of the facts from conceptual arguments. A nice example is from 7:40 in this video on applications of spectral measurements: sometimes the presence of an exoplanet can be detected by seeing red-shifts and blue-shifts of the parent star’s spectrum, as the two bodies orbit their common centre of mass. You have to take the existence of distinct spectra as a given, and if you wanted to calculate properties of the exoplanet from the magnitudes and periods of the shifts, then you’d need to do some maths. But the Doppler effect and the observations are sufficient to argue for the existence of the exoplanet, and no equations are needed to explain the argument. It’s non-trivial and interesting. But usually in physics, there’s no substitute for being able to derive and work with the equations.
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Latin-style plurals like phenomena and spectra are irregular in English, and native speakers will often assume that they’re singular nouns. I hear singular phenomena often enough that my brain only twitches mildly at it, but people at work don’t talk about spectra very often, and I maintain a very strict singular/plural distinction between spectrum and spectra.
Since I am now a paid member of Collier’s Patreon – “literally the only group of people allowed to mock [her] inability to pronounce words in the english language” – I can say that I find Collier’s haphazard use of spectrum and spectra very jarring.
Starting from 22:54 of the spectra video linked earlier, she goes on a little frustrated rant at having to use defensive language in communicating science to the public, in a way that’s not necessary when speaking with other physicists. Her example is a reference to the sun as a black body. A physicist would understand that such an approximation is sufficient for whatever discussion was about to follow, but Internet commenters would nitpick.3
So I’m nodding along, when Collier trolls me, an innocent person on the Internet, by briefly flashing up some text at 24:40.
The discussion of spectra versus spectrum is the same. If you have one it’s a ‘spectrum’ if you take a set it’s a ‘spectra’.
If you take a bunch of spectrum you average them into a spectra. You look at one plot and say ‘spectra’ or ‘spectrum’. Unless you are publishing a very specific result you may use either word. But on the internet people will complain about it.
It’s weird.
Plural ‘spectrum’! I was pretty sure that this is just simply nonstandard, but I checked some recent abstracts on astro-ph to verify. Here are instances of spectrum and spectra, with the parenthetical annotation indicating whether, based on grammar alone, the word must be functioning as singular, as plural, or could be either. (Sometimes context makes it clear whether it is singular or plural, but I am ignoring context.)
(either) Because of their non-thermal spectrum, gamma-ray bursts (GRBs) are prime particle acceleration sites
(either) We confirm the presence of reflection features in the X-ray spectrum, notably a broad iron line.
(plural) We release fully reduced spectra
(plural) From these 263 spectra
(either) We stack the GLASS-JWST spectra
(plural but ‘template’ should be plural?) Catalogs, reduced spectra, and template are made publicly available(plural) are computed self-consistently to yield emission spectra
(plural) emission spectra are only modest functions of composition
(plural) with resulting emission spectra that mimic that of a black body(either) The Gaussian Random Field opacity agrees well with the observed spectrum
(plural) In both MIRI and Spitzer spectra
(singular) the MIRI spectrum indicates
(either) than the Spitzer spectrum(either) the gravitational wave spectrum of this model
(singular) the spectrum typically follows(singular) a stellar XUV spectrum
(singular) the model spectrum is
(either) it can reproduce the observed XUV spectra
(singular) a systematically lower spectrum
(plural) the spectra are in good agreement
(either) the stellar XUV spectrum can be reasonably estimated
I did not see any clear cases of spectra being used in the singular and certainly not spectrum in the plural, so I think that written astrophysics English still maintains the traditional distinction. But it’s interesting how often the sentences allow the noun to be either singular or plural – examples in which I would consider either spectrum or spectra to be grammatical. They would mean different things, but perhaps the distinction would often be subtle. It might help explain why someone could end up with scrambled sense of when each word is supposed to be used, in addition to spectra not following the usual rule for forming an English plural.
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A little element I like in the Saga Begins music video is the cut from the desert to the cantina. Weird Al can’t play the guitar, and he just moves his left hand back and forth along the fretboard, his fingers in loose approximations of chords. But the cantina scene has an actual guitarist, and the camera focuses on his guitar as the strumming kicks in for the second verse. It’s a funny little contrast:
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I listened to Don McLean’s original, and realised that I’d never known what ‘broncin’ buck’ meant. Helpful people on Internet forums say that it’s a spoonerism for ‘bucking bronco’, the play on words working because the teenager is a young buck, and rhyming with a pink carnation and a pickup truck.
I don’t think it’s just me who was confused – John Mayer changed the lyric to ‘bouncin’ buck’ in a performance on Letterman.
The spoonerism also explains the otherwise unusual spelling, with a hard /k/ sound represented by the letter ‘c’ despite being followed by an ‘i’. This is extremely rare, English spelling in this regard generally following Late Latin, in which the ‘c’ is softened before ‘e’ or ‘i’ or ‘y’. Hence electrical but electricity. I assume the factors are:
we borrowed a lot of words from French;
when new words are coined, the existing pattern for any /s/ or /k/ sounds is generally followed;
A lot of technical words coined from Latin roots end in -ic (hard c) for the adjective and -icity (soft c) for the noun, and this is a super-strong and regular pattern, to a degree that surprises me when I think about it.
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Why softening before those vowels in particular, e/i/y? ChatGPT says that it’s because they’re front vowels, articulated closer to the front of the mouth, whereas the [k] sound is produced from near the back of the mouth. The tendency of humans to simplify the work in making sounds leads to palatalisation of the [k]. Who am I to argue with ChatGPT? It surely has a better understanding of human speech than I do. I’ve never understood all those phonetics words, unrounded mid vowels and voiced uvular fricatives etc., much though I enjoy reading linguists writing about them. There’s a structure to it all and I’m glad that some people understand what’s going on.
I read (present tense) Wikipedia’s vowel chart, which agrees with ChatGPT’s characterisation, and think that [i] feels further back than [e]. Presumably I’m wrong.
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For whatever historical reasons, English retains a lot of hard g’s before those front vowels: get, giddy, etc. Romance languages soften them in some fashion like they do with c.
A contrast in pronunciation of the equivalent Arabic letter exists across some varieties of Arabic. I went to high school in Oman, where I lived in an expat bubble and learned little more than the alphabet in a couple of months of year 8 Arabic. But one thing I learned was that while Modern Standard Arabic pronounces the letter ج (jeem) with a j sound [d͡ʒ], Egyptians use a hard [g]. It’s why Gamal Abdel Nasser isn’t Jamal.
Here’s an extended excerpt from a funny Reddit post on the subject:
A man with short curly hair in a red shirt, who I assumed was Arab from his appearance, approached me. He spoke only two words to me but those two words, or more specifically, the second of his two words were enough to turn my world upside down and cause me to re-evaluate everything I had ever learnt.
His words were, "where masgid?". I could understand from his tone that his statement was interrogative in nature, and that I was expected to respond. Some seconds passed and the man, who I later discovered to be a Masri, stared into my eyes. As he stared, the only thing I could think of, was, "What the fuck is a masgid?". Thrust with such a burden on my shoulders that I had never shouldered before, I could not decide to what to say.
"Should I just walk away, I thought to myself?". As I stood there, planning my next move, I heard in the distance, "Assalamualaikum wa rahmatullahi wa barakatuhu". It was the imam's voice being broadcast over the loudspeaker of the minaret of my intended destination. Juma was beginning. "I don't know", I responded and briskly walked away in the direction of my masjid, with the azan of Juma now being called in the background.
He began, then, to walk in the same direction as I. Perhaps this 'masgid' that he was searching for was in the same direction. I made my way to the mosque and heaved a sigh of relief as the blast of air conditioning hit my face when I entered it. I sat down as the imam began to deliver his sermon when my eyes fell upon a man entering through the door of the mosque. Lo! It was the red shirted curly haired man who was looking for the 'masgid'. As I looked at him, the man's gaze fell upon me and he gave me an utterly confused look, a mix of irritation and astonishment. I assumed that the man had decided that he should attend the Juma prayer first at the masjid before he set off in his search of the elusive 'masgid'.
Later in high school, I had a Sudanese friend who said that he also pronounced ج as [g]. And that is where my understanding stood and remained as I returned to Australia for university: Arabic has a j sound everywhere but Egypt and parts of a country bordering Egypt.
Then I read the comments on the above Reddit post, and I was astonished to read the following:
not only Egyptian but Yemeni and Omani pronounce it this way as well
an interesting fact not many people know. according to linguists that way of pronunciation is actually the "authentic" older one since ancient Arab used to speak like that. and I mean really ancient, hundreds of years before Islam/Quran
Wikipedia’s summary more or less agrees on the historical pronunciation, with [g] coming first, becoming [d͡ʒ] early enough that it spread widely. I’m not astonished that I didn’t know this though. I’m astonished that I didn’t realise that Omani Arabic has [g]. How could I not have noticed???????
Several factors may have contributed to my ignorance:
I didn’t speak Arabic, and therefore it was difficult to notice the existence of a specific sound in amongst all the other sounds, none of which I could understand. I would never have been listening carefully, and even if I had been, would I have noticed? Except in very rare circumstances, I wouldn’t have known whether the sound was supposed to be a ج or a غ.
Of the handful of phrases I would have used frequently (greetings etc.), ج might not have been in any of them.I went to an international school, where there were no Omani students. Students who spoke Arabic came from different parts of the Arabic speaking world.
We got TV from the satellite, so all the Arabic I heard there – usually either ads or soccer telecast pre-game shows – would have been in MSA.
Maybe an Omani would use MSA when explaining an Arabic word or phrase to English speakers, rather than teaching the vernacular.
As evidence for the latter, a couple of pretty useless short “Learn Arabic” videos from the Times of Oman have what I hear as a [ʒ] sound. This video, a pandemic-era Zoom recording of an intro to Omani Arabic class, has the teacher saying that both pronunciations are possible, but he will use [d͡ʒ].
It still feels slightly embarrassing.
This video, titled The Sound of the Omani Arabic dialect (Numbers, Greetings, Words, & Story), has many examples of [g].
I say it’s positive because I like physics.
As will be clear in less than a sentence, my memory is a little fuzzy, and maybe the wording isn’t exact, but I’ve got the gist of it.
I reckon it’d be a little bit of a joke at least once for a student. The sun is, famously, quite bright.