Re: Energy

[Hugh Haskell <hhaskell@MINDSPRING.COM>]

At 8:50 -0400 9/22/01, John S. Denker wrote:
> Suppose I utter the sentence "Some water flowed in through a hole in my
> shoe."
> I expect people to understand the concept of "shoe".
> I expect people to understand the concept of "hole".
> I expect people to understand the concept of "water".
> I expect people to understand the concept of "flow".

I don't have any problem with any of these assumptions, unless you
have a student or two who are into going barefoot. :-)

> I even expect people to understand that the concept of conservation, namely
> that the increase in water in my shoe was balanced by a simultaneous
> decrease in water just outside my shoe.

Not necessarily a safe assumption. Most of my students, when I ask
them what "conservation" means, give replies that are along the lines
of "you need to turn out the lights when you leave a room," or
"recycle." These aren't wrong, but they are quite different from the
meaning in a scientific sense. In fact, as you well know, there are
lots of words whose contextual meaning varies significantly from
context to context. "Field" is a good example of that. Often, these
variances are enough to seriously impede the student's understanding
of what a scientist is saying. The confusion between "law," "theory"
and "fact," so carefully cultivated by the creationists, has led to a
lot of mischief being perpetrated by those taken in by the confusion.

I often tell my students that, if they hear me saying something in
which they think they understand the meaning of every word, but that
the statement as a whole makes no sense to them, it is not because
they are stupid; it is because I am probably using several words in a
meaning that is unfamiliar to them. The sense of this comment of mine
does not originate with me, but I cannot locate the original
quotation that caused me to realize how serious a problem this often
is for students.

> Could everybody give a formal technical definition for these
> terms?  Certainly not; writing definitions is hard.  But folks can reliably
> use these terms to communicate with each other, and that's good enough for me.

As long as everyone is using the words in the same sense, and they
are not always doing so.

> My goal is to write so that people who want to understand will
> understand.  If there are others who want to misunderstand, I'm sure they
> can find a way to misunderstand;  that's not my problem.

I can become your problem is the person who is bound and determined
to misunderstand what you are trying to say is someone who is
assigned to approve or disapprove your request for a research grant
that was the reason you wrote what you did in the first place.

But it is certainly true that no matter how carefuly you write
something and how clear you make the arguments, if someone wants to
misinterpret what you say, they will. Most of us have had such
annoying experiences. I suspect that the convoluted language that
lawyers have developed happened at least in part to try to overcome
this problem. I think it goes to show that there may be limit of
clarity such that, when you pass this limit in efforts to improve
clarity, clarity is actually diminished.

Hugh
--

Hugh Haskell
<mailto://haskell@ncssm.edu>
<mailto://hhaskell@mindspring.com>

(919) 467-7610

Let's face it. People use a Mac because they want to, Windows because they
have to..
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