Re: Current Flow (shouldn't it be "charge flow?")

["Paul O. Johnson" <pojhome@SWBELL.NET>]

Praise be to Jim and Bernard, for they have taught me a new word. Although I
had seen it before, I finally looked up "reify" in my Funk & Wagnalls to
find that it means "to mentally convert something abstract into something
concrete or objective."

Several examples of what I think Jim was saying spring to mind:

Problems in mechanics in which "masses" are described when the author really
means objects that have mass.

Problems in static electricity in which "point charges" or "extended
charges" are described when the author really means small or extended
charged objects.

Other problems in static electricity in which "equipotentials" are described
when the author really means lines or surfaces every point of which are at
the same electric potential.

But perhaps physicists' tendency to reify properties is part of a broader
tendency to use words, phrases, and symbols that they learned as students,
even if it confuses their current students: Words like "body" rather than
"object", "normal" rather than "perpendicular", "condenser" rather than
"capacitor", "lab" rather than "experiment"; phrases like "moment of
inertia" rather than "rotational inertia"; symbols like "N" rather than "F"
for the perpendicular force exerted by the ramp on a sliding object.

Since words in English have so many shades of meaning, it behooves us as
teachers to speak and write carefully so as to abjure obfuscation and
minimize ambiguity. Is English the only language needing a thesaurus?

poj

----- Original Message -----
From: "Jim Green" <JMGreen@SISNA.COM>
To: <PHYS-L@lists.nau.edu>
Sent: Saturday, April 20, 2002 12:02 PM
Subject: Re: Current Flow (shouldn't it be "charge flow?")


> > I, for one, don't believe so.  Electrons have the property of mass and
> > charge.  Electrons flow through the wire.
> >
> > Brian McInnes
>
> Right you are, Brian, and praise to you for pointing this out -- but we
> physicists -- well, some of us -- insist on reifying properties. It is a
> disappointing habit -- which competent physics teachers should persist in
> trying to obliterate.
>
> Jim
>
> Jim Green
> mailto:JMGreen@sisna.com
> http://users.sisna.com/jmgreen