There is a table has been making the rounds of the science blogosphere for the last couple of weeks — and I thought it’s the kind of thing that the B-J crowd enjoys:
Blog friend Southern Fried Science is extending the list, and you can add your own gems on his public Google Docs spreadsheet.
The original table comes from this Physics Today feature — “Communicating the science of climate change“ [PDF], by Richard C. J. Somerville and Susan Joy Hassol. I entirely agree with their conclusion:
We must find ways to help the public realize that not acting is also making a choice, one that commits future generations to serious impacts. Messages that may invoke fear or dismay—as projections of future climate under business-as-usual scenarios often do—are better received if they also include hopeful components. Thus we can improve the chances that the public will hear and accept the science if we include positive messages about our ability to solve the problem. We can explain, for example, that it’s not too late to avoid the worst; lower emissions will mean reduced climate change and less severe impacts. We can point out that addressing climate change wisely will yield benefits to the economy and the quality of life. We can explain, as figure 5 shows, that acting sooner would be less disruptive than acting later. Let us rise to the challenge of helping the public understand that science can illuminate the choices we face.
The most important claim in that paragraph, IMHO, is that “it’s not too late to avoid the worst…” As outright denialism becomes ever more risible, the fall back for those hopelessly drunk on dinosaur wine* is that climate change is just too bad, because some irrecoverable threshold has already been crossed. This is nonsense. See, e.g., for just one of many arguments on this issue, this 2009 report from the Yale e360 project. [Another PDF]. Confronting the (tactical) climate fatalists is the next huge communications challenge for scientific — and science writing — communities.
That said — the gap between what’s understood in conversation between people speaking the same technical jargon, and what gets through to the public remains a major stumbling block. Which, I suppose, keeps me and my students in work. Ill winds and all that.
But I digress. The point of this post is to encourage the Balloon-Juice commentariat both to add to the list above — or perhaps, depending on your mood, to come up with a similar table, a what-they-say/what-they-mean guide to Republican debate speak.
Have fun.
*”Dinosaur wine” is a phrase I steal from Dan Jenkins’ classic (sic–ed.) football novel, Semi–Tough. So yes, I know. It ain’t dinosaur corpses that wind up in black gold.
Image: Thomas Blount, Glossographia Anglicana Nova, (Title page from the 2nd edition, 1719)
Linda Featheringill
I enjoyed your parallel dictionary. :-)
As someone who regularly has a foot in both camps, I’d like to add that the two words that lead to the most serious misunderstandings are “bias” and “values.” I will readily admit that Republicans seem to have difficulty understanding “theory.” And that “deviation” doesn’t always refer to kinky sexual practices.
ETA: And I’m first!
kerFuFFler
Love it! Explains a lot….
The Moar You Know
The public is not capable with dealing with that degree of nuance.
In a sane world, this would mean that the public was stupid. In our world, it means that scientists are elitist pricks who routinely make baby Jesus cry with their “logic” and “definitions” and “facts”.
Pongo
I had an interesting ‘what we say’ vs ‘what they hear’ moment a while back regarding the term ‘progressive.’ When used in medical context it is not often a positive, but in other contexts it often is. I had one mother tell me she was relieved to find out that her daughter’s lung disease was ‘progressive,’ because she thought that meant it would get better over time. Who woulda’ thought?
Biff Longbotham
Good post, Tom. We all too often think that when people don’t ‘get’ what we’re saying it’s because they are dumb, closed minded, obstinant, Repuplican (OK, that last one was a cheap shot), etc. But if we assume we’re using a common tongue with commonly held definitions, well… you know the saying about assumptions. Professions that share their jargon with commonly used words are going to run into this problem of miscommunication when trying to get their message out to policy makers or the general public. I’m going to forward the permalink to my eco-scientist wife and make sure it gets talked about in her large NPO.
MikeJ
@The Moar You Know: Words often have different meanings to different groups of people. This doesn’t make the general public “wrong” or “stupid”. It means that if you wish to communicate with them you need to find common meanings for words. Saying, “my definition is correct and everybody else is stupid” is the attitude that would make you an elitist prick.
JCT
@The Moar You Know: Yes, nuance is a bad word.
Simple answers for simple people. I still blame Reagan for this.
I just got off the phone with a journal editor where I spent 20 minutes carefully explaining that the human disease that I study is not some sort of magical binary state that can be explained by a simple biological assay. At least she was receptive to this concept. The general population, not so much.
Our president understands nuance very well — but no one seems to listen to him.
Jewish Steel
You scientists and your secret words think you’re so big!
Also too, I think when scientists say “anomaly” the public hears “ablablablah.”
Martin
@Biff Longbotham:
Honestly, this has nothing to do with miscommunication and everything to do with deception. We’re not having these problems because people don’t understand the subtle meanings of the words, we’re having these problems because there are groups actively undermining the meanings of these words for policial or economic reasons. Hell, the meaning of ‘citizen’ is now actively in doubt because of this, and it never was in the past.
What we’re really talking about here isn’t so much clarifying language for confused citizens (some of the suggestions in the table I think would be harder for people to understand such as ‘offset from an observation’) but defensive measures in 1984-esque language warfare. Words such as theory, bias, uncertainty aren’t unclear, rather their definitions are under attack, and our side is losing, so we’re really saying ‘don’t use those words, they’ve been compromised, use these other words that are harder to pervert’. Fuck, the word ‘theory’ is 2500 years old, and only now people fail to understand what it means?
Perhaps in our discussion of ‘clarifying language’ we could clarify what we’re really doing as opposed to what we’re suggesting that we’re doing. This isn’t some innocent byproduct of a gap between increasingly technical fields and an untechnical public, it’s a response to a deliberate and aggressive marketing activity to change the political debate.
Ohio Mom
@Pongo: On the other hand, when my kid was three and diagnosed with autism, the official letter from the doctor included a list of his strengths and the words, “I expect him to progress.” By which she meant, “I expect him to continue to develop skills and ways of compensating for his challenges.”
But my first reaction, knowing how doctors usually use the word ‘progress’, was “PROGRESS?! like cancer progresses?! It’s going to get worse?!” I had to read that letter four times over before I was sure I understood she was being hopeful. Which she was right to be, my kid’s made wonderful progress.
Sometimes doctors forget the rest of us don’t speak their language. I hate to think of the moment your friend found out what ‘progressive lung disease’ really means.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
I’m not sure if this is as purely a vocubulary problem as it looks at first sight. I think scientists have a problem with getting people to trust them (and if you don’t have trust nobody is really going to listen to what you have to say) because they can’t get the public to distinguish between three different groups who often sound the same to the lay ear: scientists, technologists, and technocrats. And it seems to me that the last 100 years or so of Western history have taught the public a highly justified wariness of and lack of trust in the pronouncements of the technologists, and technocrats. If scientists want to be heard, they have to find a way to speak in a way which the average person can distinguish from the latter two groups.
Capri
I was in a faculty meeting the other week trying to craft something that would be sent to the state legislature to explain how great we are and why we should continue to receive funding. One of the things some in my department do is “translational research” in the context of basic bench research and animal model research that is then applied to humans. I maintained that if you told your average state senator that you did translational research, they’d think you were figuring out how to turn French and German classics into English, and that we had to use other words or at least define it somehow.
Most of the group, however, said that everyone knew what translational research was and that it didn’t need to be explained.
piratedan
well then, since we are playing the Princess Bride double meaning game with jargon and terminology; if corporations are “people”, how come the executive board of Lehman Brothers weren’t brought up on charges of murder?
Martin
@JCT:
I’ve been struggling with something like this at work. I’ve been trying to explain this particularly subtle problem to about 100 PhDs, and they just don’t get it (it’s a fairly complex game theory problem, with fairly straightforward solutions *if* you understand how the solutions change relative to context, which they don’t get), and I’m banging my head against the wall because if they could get it, they could actively help in its solution rather than just railing on me for not having solved it by magically redesigning the problem.
One night I just needed to vent about the problem and unloaded the whole mess on my wife, and she said ‘You know, when you started that job, you would have been able to take a week to work up a thorough explanation and they would have had a week to read through that thorough explanation and understand it – but you barely have hours to do that write up and I bet they barely have hours to read it’. And I realized that she’s right – the problem is that we’ve expanded the scope of what we do to such a degree that it’s nearly impossible to do justice to all of the things that we do (either from the provider or consumer side), and that our expectations for information delivery have changed significantly, and that for informal information (as I’ve been trying to present it) if you can’t explain it in 3 minutes, then you’re going to fail. Her suggestion was to write it up formally – as if it were a journal submission – because they still have the expectation to need to spend time reading and understanding formal information. So that’s what I’m doing as time allows.
I think we’ve hit a point that people will invest more time trying to understand something presented visually, than they will trying to understand something just in writing. Might be time for us to stop expecting the world to change for our sake, and for us to change to adapt to their new expectations.
MonkeyBoy
One word that needs a translation is “significant”.
I don’t know how many times I’ve heard the misunderstanding of a statement like “global warming over the last 10 years is not statistically significant” to mean “there has been no global warming”.
Though I guess this word just needs to be avoided rather than translated because the real meaning of the above phrase may be that 10 years is too short a time period to analyze for one to have strong confidence (19/20) that it indicates warming and not random fluctuations.
Linda Featheringill
@Biff Longbotham:
Your eco-scientist wife might appreciate this population interactive from The Guardian.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2011/oct/24/how-big-worlds-population-born
Warning: Old folks [like me] can’t really play with the app because their data doesn’t go back that far. [Arghhhhhh!]
Linda Featheringill
@Capri:
No.
jayackroyd
Pet peeve, because I tend to use it in the math/science way.
imply.
public: indirect reference (“What are you implying?”)
better: follows directly from (“(A,B)=>C”)
Martin
@MonkeyBoy: ‘significant’ isn’t the word that needs translation, but ‘statistically significant’ should never be used in a colloquial context. Hell, it shouldn’t even be decoupled from the statistics it’s declaring to be significant. ‘Statistically significant’ has a specific meaning, and that meaning is dependent on your assumptions. If you don’t present your assumptions and your model, then it has no value – you’re just tossing it in there to be authoritative: “I did some real math so my hypothesis trumps your hypothesis”. But it’s easy to game the model to achieve a statistically significant result but a review of the model would easily show that you’re really full of shit.
General Stuck
FYI
Gallup daily polling on Obama has risen 6 points in three days. That is all
edit – make that 5 days
Mino
Dinosaur wine is more Republican-specific than Kool-aid. I like it.
Martin
@Capri: Translational research is a fairly new term. Even if your average state senator was trained in the sciences, unless they’ve been keeping up recently, they’d have missed the term altogether, even if they clearly understand the meaning behind it. How long has the phrase been in common use? A decade or so?
Culture of Truth
Journalists usually, wisely, refrain from math, but boy do they love to throw around the term ‘margin of error’, because they think it makes them look careful and smart. At least half the time it doesn’t.*
* plus or minus 3%
jayackroyd
<—dumb ass. Entirely missed the point of the post.
Correction
imply means indirectly refer to.
better to use "C follows directly from (A,B)"
RSA
I’m writing a popular science book, and I’m trying to avoid jargon of this kind (though not exactly these terms). It’s actually tough, and it makes you realize how much a specialized vocabulary makes it easier to be concise or precise, for those who understand it.
This is probably a good pragmatic approach for this issue. In the long term, though (assuming that we have a long term to think about), I think there’s a bigger problem that needs to be addressed: People need to separate the identification of a problem from the choices to do something about it. This distinction is missed in most climate change denial, from what I’ve read. “I don’t like any of the proposals for dealing with global climate change, so I’m going to deny the existence of the problem.” Making proposals that are more palatable will help, but it doesn’t help the next time a problem comes along. I imagine it’s human nature, though.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
The public doesn’t understand the term critical, in a nuclear setting or a medical setting.
Tom Levenson
@RSA: On what subject? When should we look for it?
Walker
“Random” is the most abused scientific term in existence. Lay people (and some scientists) assign a causality meaning to this term, when it is just descriptive. Indeed it is the causality connotations of randomness that makes evolution so scary to the lay person.
Sir Nose'D
Having been recently empowered to speak on behalf of all scientists everywhere, I would say (1) it is a good substitution list, and (2) two thirds of scientists are terrible communicators and this list will likely help half of them. About a third of all scientists are terrible at communicating with the public and see this largely as the public’s fault for being so stupid. I really despise this group. Another third are trying and slowly coming along–this list should help. A final third are already pretty good (they are using terms like tipping point instead of critical (a la comment 26 Belafon) , but this list will definitely help them as well.
Also, too. Get out to your local Pub Science events, and give your speaker feedback, especially if they are trying to communicate but are failing. Most scientists are trying to do better (our granting agencies now require that we do better with public outreach).
BJ Scientists working on improving their communication skills with the general public – get a copy of “Don’t be such a scientist” by Randy Olson. It will help.
Tom Levenson
@Sir Nose’D:
<== This. Randy knows what he is talking about. See also this interview he did with actor and improv guru Jeremy Rowley on the subject of getting scientists to the point where they can get their messages across to more or less any audience.
Randy’s website is a good place to check on from time to time for much more on this.
JCT
@Martin: Couldn’t agree more. Been there, done that. The true torment is that intellectually this is a fantastic time to be in research — but the day to day is becoming intrusive to an unimaginable degree. I also see patients and that part of my life would be much, much more pleasurable if I could actually spend more time with them instead of arguing on the phone with admins about what tests I’m ordering.
I’m chuckling, I “transmit” my frustration to my spouse about this all the time. The only problem is that he’s a theoretical physicist and thinks that biologists are “none too smart”. Sigh. I assume I’m not included. Hmmm.
Yes — a perfect example is the decrease in the standard length of the NIH R01. At first blush it sounds great, and I certainly appreciate not having to wade through the 25-pages when I review them. But writing them, especially conveying complex ideas that challenge established assumptions (what we’re supposed to be doing..) is very difficult and frustrating.
I think the worst part of this more frenetic pace is that it makes what we do look less appealing, I know that my grad students are not so sure that they want to do what I do — and that is truly unfortunate.
piratedan
@Sir Nose’D: well the point I was unclear in making in my previous comment upthread, is that while this is applicable to scientists, its certainly not exclusive to it. I know that we have parallels to this same issue in technology, military and legal professions as well. It wouldn’t surprise me to find out its an issue in financial services either.
quintillian
Tom … love this list. The other day you posted a link to Merchants of Doubt, and it got me thinking about your list of favorite science writing. I ask because I work with secondary teachers and one of them is having his sophomores read Henrietta Lacks. What do you (or others) think are compelling reads for middle school or high school students? Are there shorter texts, such as magazines or websites, that you think are particularly strong? I’m thinking of the sort of texts/books that have a narrative logic behind them, but maybe there are things I’m not considering. Maybe you’ve addressed this kind of question at another time, but I’d like to encourage more and more reading of science journalism and of short non-fiction texts too. Thoughts? Suggestions? Thanks. Love your posts.
tkogrumpy
@Martin: What he said.
eugene
scientific term: arugula (eruca sativa), an edible annual plant
public meaning: an elitist food that english professors and welfare queens buy with our tax dollars
better term: lettuce
Tom Levenson
@quintillian: Let me give this a proper think and put up a post on it, OK?
RSA
@Tom Levenson:
Thanks for asking, Tom. It’s on computer science, and it should be out from Oxford next year (I hope).
As a famous computer scientist has sometimes said, most books about computing aimed at the general public are a lot like drivers’ manuals. I’d add that there are excellent histories of computing, stories about the computing industry, and a few other categories, but there’s only a tiny handful of non-texbooks that try to convey the concepts behind the technology to people without any special technical background. (For contrast, you can find lots of interesting books about biology that don’t start out, “Make sure that you buy a microscope with such and such lens…” :-) I’m shooting for that target, and hoping that the result will be interesting.
Tom Levenson
@RSA: Cool. That would be a great service. And could/should find a noticeable audience. Somewhat related — have you looked at Ian Horswill’s “What is Computation” piece?
I’ve just been referred to it (also the Nature of Computing tome, which I’m holding off from purchasing…as, perhaps, being surplus to my modest requirements), and haven’t read it yet. Your reax?
MattF
Oh, boy. How about ‘random’? This is sort of a hobby-horse of mine– even when people think they know what random is, they don’t. Like when my brother-in-law complains that his iPod’s ‘shuffle’ mode isn’t random because it repeats stuff. ‘Scuse me whilst I bang head against wall.
Added: I note that ‘Walker’ in comment #28 said it first.
Catsy
@Martin:
This.
While there is indeed a communication issue that needs to be overcome here, let’s not lose sight of the fact that many of the “public” definitions of words and phrases like these–especially when used in a scientific context–are simply wrong and need to be corrected.
Scientists in general do need to do a better job of presenting information intended for public consumption, but some of these differences in meaning are not legitimate alternate definitions, they are the result of deliberate disinformation and FUD from anti-science conservatives. We need to be pushing back against this kind of disinformation and helping educate the public.
kc
Oh, my God, I LOVE “Semi-Tough,” and everything else Dan Jenkins has written. He’s funny as hell.
jayackroyd
I’m wondering. Do scientists writing for the public sometimes use opacity of language as a means of conferring authority onto themselves?
DFH no.6
@Walker:
You may very well be correct that “random” is the most abused term (i.e., in how often the term is mis-used), but I submit that mis-use (often deliberate) and misunderstanding of the scientific term “theory” is the most important and the most problematic.
Thus, in common parlance biological evolution is “just a theory”. You know, merely some speculation on how life came to be as we see it, with little to support it in reality, rather than the best currently constructed scientific explanation for the phenomena of life on our planet, based on observations and empirical data.
Very much like the attacks against the theory of anthropogenic global climate change.
The dismissive phrase “just a theory” demonstrates how great a gulf exists between the ordinary understanding of the term and its scientific meaning.
Tom Levenson
@jayackroyd: Probably. So do science writers. One of the first things we convey to our (very bright) students is that they have to embrace the willingness to ask stupid questions to make sure they get what their sources are telling them. Can be hard to do (he says from experience).
jayackroyd
@DFH no.6:
Tom’s resolution of that problem seems unsatisfying to me: “theory” “scientific understanding” while “aerosol” = “tiny atmospheric particle.”
We do have Laws, though. And people do get that the law of gravity is not the same thing as law and order. And it really is still the quantum theory; there is still the possibility that Einstein’s intuitive distrust of non determinant systems may prove to be more correct.
But there is no more firmly established scientific understanding than natural selection. Can we start calling it the law of natural selection? Not really, right? There really is something qualitatively different in that understanding than F=G*(m1*m2/r^2)
Walker
@DFH no.6:
I agree that the misuse of “theory” is pretty bad.
However, the problem with “random” is that it is even misused by other scientists. I have seen biologists use random when they really mean “undirected”. These are very different concepts and if we conflate them in the scientific community, what hope do the lay people have.
jayackroyd
@Tom Levenson:
It seemed to me that Hawking did that with Brief History of Time. Just the opposite of Feynmann in QED.
Economists certainly do that. But part of what is going on is the use of special language to denote that you are, in fact, an insider. That’s not limited to science, of course. All the bloggy nicknames and snark that took place in the early days of the liberal blogosphere were not just shorthanded criticism (“The Village” “Dirty Fucking Hippies” “Tweety”) but signifiers that one was part of the in group.
You would think, though, that when writing for those not in the in group, you’d consider it a bad thing to use those signifiers.
quintillian
@Tom Levenson: Thanks Tom. I’m in absolutely no hurry, but I wanted to take the chance to ask while you had a semi-related post. I appreciate it greatly. Looking forward to reading your thoughts and suggestions. Thanks a ton.
Capri
@Martin:
Yes, that was my point. Most of my fellow faculty members didn’t agree.
Southern Beale
Well, speaking of words … Mitt Romney’s newly-released paperback edition of his memoir has a few selective edits to “enhance” (meaning, LIE) about his state healthcare plan and if he thought it would work nationally.
I do not understand Republicans like this. Don’t fucking LIE about shit that is so easily verified.
JGabriel
RE: Blount’s Glossographia Anglicana Nova.
I’m always amazed by the prolixity of 16th & 17th C. writing, because: they had to write all that shit out by hand. With a fucking quill.
.
uptown
Words matter…
public communication is about understanding your audience and speaking to them.
JCT
@Southern Beale: C’mon, these guys haven’t even figured out that the whole point of video tape is to watch something at a later date — as in “we know exactly what you said”.
These are complicated concepts.
RSA
@Tom Levenson:
I have, and I think it’s excellent. (It deserves to be published somewhere–I should ask Ian if and where he’s sent it out.) Two other books that have influenced my thinking about this area are Blown to Bits: Your Life, Liberty, and Happiness after the Digital Explosion, by Hal Abelson, Ken Ledeen, and Harry Lewis (Addison Wesley, 2008), and The Pattern on the Stone: The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work, by W. Daniel Hillis (Basic Books, 1999). They’re a little bit more specialized than Ian’s paper, but they’re similarly accessible.
J.W. Hamner
Jargon is an issue even when scientists from different fields are talking to each other. You can have a PhD and be an acknowledged expert in your field and still find somebody’s article/talk completely incomprehensible because of jargon and excessive use of abbreviations. Communicating your work is just as important as the work itself since if nobody understands it you might as well not have done it. It’s sort of shocking how little attention many scientists pay to this… expecting the data to speak for itself I suppose.
Anoniminous
@RSA:
How are you going to get around talking about Set Theory? Or – goddess help you – Category Theory?
Walker
@Anoniminous:
Those are just formal models meant to make arguments more precise. If this is a general audience text, everything that is captured by those models could be expressed in natural language.
RSA
@Walker:
Well… For better or worse, I don’t. The book doesn’t get down to mathematical fundamentals and is very light on theory in general. Do you know Alan Bierman’s Great ideas in computer science? The only time he talks explicitly about sets (if I remember correctly) is in a discussion of non-computability, and I do something similar. It’s not rigorous, but I hope it gives the right flavor.
Anoniminous
@Walker:
I grant the possibility. In the sense that there isn’t anything in the Laws of the Universe – as we know them, at this time – to preclude it.
Having just spent the last several weeks as Speaker to Marketing, the corporate department infested with people who think an electron is the same shape, color, and size of a small pea …
I have my reservations.
:-)
Anoniminous
@RSA:
I haven’t read Bierman so I don’t know how, or if, he wedged Davis’ Computability and Unsolvability in.
I don’t see how you can adequately ‘splain Object Oriented Programming without some fairly gnarly (for the average reader) exposition on Category Theory … but then I’m not your market.
RSA
@Anoniminous:
Clearly not. :-) (Though a couple of anonymous reviewers, who I assume are computer scientists, thought it was an enjoyable read even though they knew all the material inside and out.)
I don’t even get to object-oriented programming. I spend an entire chapter explaining how to read what ends up being a 7-line Python program. It sounds funny when I put it like that, but there’s a lot of conceptual background that goes into understanding even a trivial program, as you know.
Anoniminous
@RSA:
Ain’t that the truth.
I try to tell the young-uns they need to grok Assembler Language if they really want to understand how Things Work. If I’m feeling particularly “old-farty” (HEY! You kids! Get the @#$%@! off my computer system!) I tells ’em they need to learn micro-code.
(lol)
Good Luck on the book.
Peter
Late to the party perhaps, but there is an excellent section in John Ralston Saul’s Voltaire’s Bastards on the deliberate use of jargon and obscurantist language by “experts” to signal membership in the club, so to speak, and to make sure the great unwashed don’t get to chip in on whatever their specialty is. It’s been a few years since I read it, but as i recall it’s well worth reading on this topic (as indeed is the whole book, for the record).
Porlock Junior
Using a trick: Cleverly solving a hard problem by using a method that doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the problem but actually makes it easier.
Definitely belongs with Manipulation. Remember the trick the lying Soros-tools used in their secret papers?
(Still not quite satisfied with my definition, but maybe peer review will improve it.)
SoINeedAName48
Sully (yeah THAT Sully) has a great post on helping understand “repubican-speak” by implementing the “repubican Dictionary”
Some sample definitions:
Source:
http://andrewsullivan.thedailybeast.com/2011/10/a-republican-dictionary.html
Porlock Junior
@jayackroyd:
“…people do get that the law of gravity is not the same thing as law and order. And it really is still the quantum theory; there is still the possibility that Einstein’s intuitive distrust of non determinant systems may prove to be more correct.”
The actual problem with “theory” is that even scientists will use the word in both its vulgar and its learned sense. The former, of course, is as in “just a theory”.
But quantum theory is not so called because of doubt (vulgar sense), but because it’s a theory (elitist sense). Where, after all, is the doubt about either the Special Theory of Relativity (in its circumscribed field of application) or the General one? Yet Theories they remain, because laws are different things from theories. And simpler ones, frequently components of a general theory: try that on the “just a theory” people, unless you choose not to confuse them hopelessly.
Actually, Laws seem to have gone rather out of fashion in the past century. The Lorenz transformations could have been called laws, and probably would have been if they’d come up a few decades earlier. Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty is hardly ever called a law. Volterra’s Law is mainly called the Volterra-Gause principle. Bell’s Theorem is a mere theorem, how dull. The fundamental law of voting is called Arrow’s Paradox instead.
The Third Law of Thermodynamics would be a cool — sorry — counterexample, if it had been the First and not a successor to two from Victorian times.
If those would-have examples aren’t convincing, I give you, ladies and gentlemen, the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology! No way that could have been less than a Law 100 years earlier.
I think Crick was showing a nice bit of British cynicism about Grand Universal Laws, and he was not the only one to react this way.
Whether any of this could help to disabuse a sensible ordinary citizen of the idea “A Law is better than a Theory is better than a hypothesis” is not clear.
PS: The snark-based distinctions between upper- and lower-case nouns don’t seem to have worked out very well, but there is not enough time in this Edit-post cycle to work it out fully. So, Stet.