Just so you'll know that Jim Green is not a lone voice crying in the
wilderness on this issue, here's a quote from the latest AJP page 597
(taken from Atmospheric Thermodynamics by Craig F. Bohren and Bruce A.
Albrecht, 1998):
"We try to use the word 'heat' as little as possible, sometimes as an
adjective, as in 'heat transfer,' energy transfer resulting from
temperature differences, but never as a noun. Not much more than a century
ago heat was looked upon as a substance, a massless, colorless, odorless
fluid called 'caloric.' According to the caloric theory, bodies were
heated because of the passage of caloric from one to another. This theory
of heat had its successes and hence deserves a bit of respect. Slide rules
were once the only means for fairly rapid multiplication and division. Now
that we have pocket calculators and desktop computers, we don't use slide
rules. They had their day, did what was asked of them, but were
superceded. They should be buried with full ceremonial honors and then
forgotten. And so it is with the caloric theory of heat. It is officially
dead, thus should receive decent burial and remain below ground. Yet
although most textbooks officially acknowledge the death of caloric, they
then proceed to do everything possible to breathe life into its corpse.
Vestiges of the caloric theory remain, for example, in the unit 'calorie,'
in phrases such as the amount of heat added or absorbed by a body, in
thermodynamic quantities such as heat capacities, and so on. In everyday
speech, heat as a substance is as vigorous as ever. For example, we
frequently hear 'heat rises.'"
Though I bet Jim Green would even object to the first sentence of the quote.
Anyway, folks, it isn't just Jim telling us this. Maybe we ought to listen
and find some way to improve the language for generations to come. I've
tried to re-write some of my labs with this injunction in mind, and it is
_hard_. It is one thing to object to current language usage, and quite
another to propose acceptable alternatives. I need help with the latter.