Scientific language

On Aristotle, Ortony, Metaphor and Thought, 3 on "plainnesse" in the new scientific language, Thomas Sprat, History of the Royal Society, 111, 113 and, more recently, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer,... 

PASCAL was developed as a scientific language. It was followed by C and its successor C++, which have practical shortcuts for matrix operations that FORTRAN treats so clumsily C++ is a favorite for computer science courses. It has now morphed into Python. 

In another class are languages written for specific architectures, including CFD (10) for the Illiac IV, Glypnir (11), also for the Illiac IV, and SL/1 (12) for the Star. Such languages are obviously not portable due to the small number of Star s and Illiac s in the world, and thus do not represent a viable alternative. Indeed the large number of available architectures makes portability of paramount concern a scientific language must be architecture independent if it is to be useful. 

Runge s materials are animated. They act wilfully, it would seem. Chemicals combine or unite. They marry and split. Runge s scientific language is one of affinity and repulsion. In his text of 1834, Colour Chemistry, Founded on the Chemical Relations of Cotton Thread to Salts and Acids, he notes, for example, the affinity of cotton for different dye substances. These characteristics - such as the instability of cochineal red - form a sort of personality. In the opening pages of Basic Outline of Chemistry of 1848, Runge notes that there are now 59 elements in the world. Each of these has its own characteristics and displays a specific behaviour The chemical behaviour of an element depends on its chemical activity, and this activity is its peculiar expression of life when confronted by another element. 20... 

How are electrolyte solutions formed, and what effect does the nature of the electrolyte and the solvent produce on this process In what state is the ion present in solution What is the structure of the solution and the solvent, water in particular These and many other questions are discussed in this booklet written in popular and, at the same time, strictly scientific language. The booklet is intended for school undergraduates, students, and teachers, as well as for all those who strive to widen their knowledge in chemistry. 

Anderson, Wilda C. The Rhetoric of Scientific Language An Example from Lavoisier, Mondern Language Notes 96, 1981, 746-770. 

The complex composition of toxaphene also creates nomenclature problems. Initially, toxaphene was the trademark of the product manufactured by the Hercules Inc. However, due to the non-restricted use of the trademark, toxaphene has become a general term for this pesticide. Further frequently applied terms were camphechlor , polychlorinated bornanes , camphenes , and ter-penes , as well as chlorobornanes . The expression toxaphene is not the same as the trademark Toxaphene , since residues in the environment may also originate from other technical products (see Table 2). Toxaphene is the reaction product of the chlorination of technical camphene is a suitable definition of the expression used in the scientific language [27]. Owing to the problems with abbreviations as described below, toxaphene will be used in the following chapters as a synonym for the compounds of technical toxaphene. 

Russelfi was also of the opinion that (1) all language is vague (and this includes scientific language), (2) there exists a hierarchy of vagueness,... 

Despite the fact that the reports of these committees are written in a very scientific language, one cannot avoid that they are not always fully scientific in their conclusions. Numbers and figures on permitted levels of toxic substances have no longer the same intrinsic value after passing this step of risk-benefit analysis as those resulting from the toxicity analysis. They are not built on the same rational basis and have another meaning which would be far too long to discuss here. 

The analogy can be pressed further. Like planned cities, planned languages are indeed possible. Esperanto is one example technical and scientific languages are another, and they are quite precise and powerful means of expression within the limited purposes for which they were designed. But language per se is not for only one or two purposes. It is a general tool that can be bent to countless ends by virtue of... 

N. Jardine, A Dip into the Future , Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 20 (1989), pp. 15-18, p. 17. On sociological analyses of scientific language see Golinski, Making Natural Knowledge 103-32. 

The intention of the Green Book ever since its appearance was not to present a list of recommendations as commandments, but rather its aim was and still is to help the user in what may be called a good practice of scientific language . Many well-established conventions are used in science and technology, but mixing conventions can lead to misunderstandings or even cause severe errors. One of those errors, caused by confusion of metric and imperial units, led to the loss of the NASA Mars Climate Orbiter (MCO) in 1999, worth about 200 Million USD of equipment and a non-quantified loss of scientific data and work. The reason for tlie loss of MCO was that Lockheed Martin Astronautics (LMA) software used imperial units (Ibf s) and Jet Propulsion Laboratory expected output from the LMA software... 

Many school-made misconceptions occur because there are problems with the specific terminology and the scientific language, specially involved substances, particles and chemical symbols are not clearly differentiated. If the neutralization is purely described through the usual equation, HC1 + NaOH —> NaCl + H20, then the students have no chance to develop an acceptable mental model that uses ions as smallest particles. 

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