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From “Conceptual Physics” by Paul Hewitt | |||||||
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| square inch) then this pressure of fifteen pounds per square inch will be communicated to every square inch of the area with which the liquid is in contact. If part of this area is another piston with an area of one square foot (12” x 12” or 144 square inches) the total force on this big piston will be 15 pounds per square inch times 144 square inches or a little over a ton. My push of fifteen pounds can thereby lift a ton. In physics (and in other sciences) the use of jargon which precisely and restrictively defines the words does more than simplify the communication between physicists; it helps each of us in private to move, with the aid of mathematics, from what we knew to what we didn't know. Actually jargon has many functions. In the law, it insures that others in the profession know exactly what is meant so that basic disagreements are not further confounded by semantic misunderstandings. But as in other jargon used in fields such as medicine and finance, legal jargon can be used to exclude the uninitiated or to make it appear that the initiated know what they are talking about when, in fact, they are not really saying anything. In the Exploratorium, as in most forms of teaching, the problem is quite the reverse. Our | problem is how to include the uninitiated in jargon without making the subject incomprehensible because our discussion is too long winded. The jargon of the family can illustrate this difficulty. Frieda is my son Mike's second cousin twice removed. I personally consider any language involving removed cousins to be jargon. I forget its meaning immediately after I have learned it. My friends, of course, run into the same problem when I try to tell them that a hologram is an “interference pattern.” The problem involves unraveling the jargon without making the unraveling impossible to follow. In this example, I could avoid jargon by telling you that Mike is the son of the son of the son of Opah, and that Frieda is the daughter of the son of the daughter of the son of the daughter of Opah. A reader could probably construct a diagram from this information and from it understand the relationship between Mike and Frieda, but I doubt that anyone listening to that amount of daughters and sons would learn much. One choice might be to say, simply and accurately, that Mike is Opah’s great-great-grandson and Frieda is Opah’s great-great-great-great granddaughter. But this description would not help much to describe the relationship because it includes the possibility that Frieda is Mike’s granddaughter. Perhaps the most comprehensible way to | ||||||