SCIENCE DIALECTS - long post

[James A. Landau]

While mostly insightful and informative, the quotations in this post contain
some incorrect remarks.

>  Linnaeus
>  embedded his binomials in a system of arithmetically defined
>  taxa that sometimes put species in the wrong families.

Linnaeus binomials consist of genus+species.  If a binomail puts a species in
the wrong family, that is the fault of a genus being misclassified, not the
fault of the binomial nomenclature.

>  the systematic names of chemical compounds invented by Antoine
>  Lavoisier (1743-1794) and his collaborators remain in use,
>  although they are not free from damaging idolatry.

No example of "idolatry" is given that I can see.

>  French chemists admitted the substance caloric, which does not
>  exist, among their elements, and coined "oxygen'' on the
>  mistaken idea that the gas so designated gave acids their
>  acidity. But the terminology, erected on the enlightened
>  principles of rationality, order and universality, proved
>  flexible enough to drop erroneous reifications (like caloric)
>  and ignore misnomers (like oxygen).

Whoever wrote this statement did not read Lavoisier, who said that while he
personally rejected the phlogiston theory, in his book he was setting up a
system that would work whether you accepted or rejected the phlogiston
theory.  He then proceeded to write a book of classifications and
nomenclature that pretty much ignored caloric.

As for "oxygen" being a misnomer, who cares?  The writer is making the
preposterous assertion that chemists, when they see the word "oxygen",
habitually say to themselves "acid-generator".  This is not true, even in
Germany where the word has been rendered in German as "sauerstoff".  Or for
that matter, how many English-speaking rocket engineers are distracted every
time they use the term "LOX" ("liquid oxygen") by the thought of bagels?  Was
Werner von Braun perpetually distracted because his colleagues were in the
habit of referring to sauerstoff as "sauerkraut"?

>   Lavoisier's influential textbook _Elementary
>  Treatise on Chemistry_ in 1789

A writer who goes on at length about the "jocularity" of American scientists
whould be expected to catch the pun in the above title.

>  Students of fruit flies favour bouncy names in the
>  style of particle physicists: armadillo, hedgehog,
>  lost-in-space. Mouse geneticists like dull ones, such as
>  beta-catenin, which happens to be the same gene as armadillo. A
>  single gene (selectin L) has 15 different aliases, whereas MT1
>  refers to at least 11 different genes.The cure for this genetic
>  disorder is a computer, which identifies a gene not by its name
>  but by systematic descriptors.

The writer overlooks the (to me) obvious fact that you cannot have good
nomenclature in a science until you have considerable well-understood data on
which to base your nomenclature.  Genetics may be overdue for a nomenclature
reform, but to reach the state of needing reform it needed to have
accumulated a large number of identified genes to discuss, and geneticists
had to come up with some kind of names or identifiers for these genes or they
wouldn't have well-understood data on which to base a reform.

The remark about computers is irrelevant.  Computers can be programmed to
deal with whimsical names.  Systematic descriptors are for humans.

>  Perhaps the most
>  important general nomenclature revision was the adoption of a
>  binomial scheme for naming compounds (influenced by the scheme
>  then current in botany), but of specific importance was the
>  renaming of "*dephlogisticated air" ("empyreal air; vital air)
>  as "oxygen", and the renaming of "inflammable air" as
>  "hydrogen", both new names based on prevailing knowledge of
>  chemistry rather than on ambiguous attributes.

There is no binomial scheme in chemistry and never was.  The best-understood
chemical compounds in Lavoisier's day were the "salts", which were by that
time known to consist of what we now call "anions" and "cations" and hence
had to have two-part names.  On the other hand, Lavoisier and his
collaborators used one-part names for chemical compounds that were not salts.


"Ambiguous attributes" is incorrect.  The phlogiston theory did what a theory
is supposed to---it gave a plausible explanation for a large number of
observed facts.  It is a strength of the phlogiston theory that it was able
to explain new discoveries such as oxygen (which was classified for a time as
"dephlogisticated air.")  What happened to the phlogiston theory is that
Lavoisier started making careful measurements to a unheard-of precision and
discovered that the large amount of existing data that the phlogistion theory
explained so well was either incorrect, incomplete, or misinterpreted.

It was not the new nomenclature that drove out phlogiston; it was the
accumulation of better observations that led Lavoisier to find a better
theory.  Names like "dephlogicated air" went out of use because there was now
a better explanation for what it was, and the new nomenclature followed the
new theory.

I repeat: nomenclature follows theory, because nomenclature DESCRIBES what
the theory is saying, not the other way around.

>  An argument can be made that nomenclature in science is as
>  important as data, since nomenclature represents the prevailing
>  conceptual organization of observations. Certainly, researchers
>  in most sciences are constrained to adhere to the nomenclature
>  rules of their field.

In science nomenclature is a tool; experiment is the driver.
"Researchers...are constrained to adhere to the nomenclature rules"  So what
else is new?  English-speaking scientists are constrained to adhere to the
highly unscientific grammar rules of English.  Once the nomenclature fails to
describe the experimental data, then it is time for scientists to consider
revising the nomenclature.

Also, I fail to see why the writer said "in most sciences".  What sciences
lack nomenclature?

>  The new language ignored the
>  physiological senses of chemists, banished all reference to
>  geographical origins or the discovery of the substances, and
>  imposed an analytical quantitative logic on chemical
>  nomenclature. Although the use of this logic proved to be a
>  valuable method over time, the principles of the system were
>  never strictly applied. Oxygen, for example, should have been
>  renamed when Humphrey Davy (1778-1829) established that many
>  acids do not contain oxygen.

Yes, that is correct.  Similarly the United States should change the name of
its monetary unit to avoid confusion with the Canadian dollar.  Despite
correcting Lavoisier's theory of acids, Davy never suggested renaming the
element that he liked to spell "oxygene".


>  Colors and odors were restored
>  after the discovery of chlorine and iodine, named from the Greek
>  for "yellowish-green" and "violet", respectively. Bromine was
>  named from the Greek word for "stink".

What would the writer have preferred as names for these elements?  Many
chemists have no training in Greek, and those who do don't habitually
translate element names.

Actually the writer should compliment these alleged-misguided Greek speakers
for having the foresight to give "chlorine", "bromine" and "iodine" a
consistent suffix, to make it easy to remember that they fall in the same
family---and to have done so decades bfore Mendelev and his Periodic Table.

Would the writer object to the name "fluorine" for the first element of this
family?  "Flourine" comes from "fluorspar", the mineral in which it was most
frequently encountered in those days, but "fluorspar" is itself a descriptive
name.

>  Benzene was named after Styrax
>  benzoin, a tree native to Sumatra and Java.

So?  Long before benzene was discovered, its parent chemical had been named
"benzoic acid" by Lavoisier and friends.

>   In general, the systematization imposed by
>  the four 18th century reformer chemists in the name of
>  rationality remained an ideal often contradicted by practice.

Can the writer provide a better way to have named the elements?  Considering
that "uranium" had been named by Klaproth in 1789 after the planet "Uranus",
is it acceptable that in the 1940's American chemists would name the next two
elements "neptunium" and "plutonium"?

      - James A. Landau