What is the language of Science?

How did the scientific words come about?

Since early primitive times, whenever we wish to bring up a new topic, we create a word-sound, making an allusion to that shape or kind of thing. The classification and later recognition of the numbers and the mathematical symbols is a form of language and, as in the other languages we know, all we need is a word for every situation:  the scientific terminology.

We all are nonstop processing every single perception of the senses, sorting and recognizing the events around us by way of their formal or numerical features.

In the realistic domain of the science of physics, all the existing objects and events tally with a matching set of real numbers characterizing their properties. In such classical objective reality, the properties of the object are attributes that brand it distinctly, and the attributes are real, even if these properties cannot be directly observed or measured, for they exist there and then independently, and not only when observed by one person individually.

All the sciences have always relied on the mathematician´s draft to be able to compute and process their data. By quantifying the observations with figures, we can form models to explain everything in the Universe, for all physical events, and space and time: it is the description of the internal structure of objects expressed in numbers, and their mechanics spelled out with consistent algorithms and termed by differential calculus.

Every single mathematical notation aiming at the calculation of results is keen on translating the observed phenomenon through “computability", writing down an appropriate (mathematically best describing) equation representing the event in question.

One notation can be simpler and more elegant than another representing the same calculation, both elaborated to describe the same phenomenon, with no problems.

Some scientists study certain events in particles physics developing their own mathematical notations, and later they experience some difficulties with the words and concepts needed to describe some odd newfound results in their research.

The data arriving from the observed experiments are collected with the aid of mathematical tools that deliver numerical results to be interpreted by the scientist.

However, when facing the need to describe these formulations and results in a non-mathematical way, the scientist encounters many difficulties to talk about his new theory, feeling limited by the existing common-usage lexicon.

The mathematical models are not real but are well representative of an object. They seek to shape a template that best describes the reality of the natural phenomena, such as chemical compounds representations, for example.
Mathematical models are suitable tools to visualize and to understand components and how they operate, employing the mode that our brain understands best, given the functions of the model. Scientific models are very useful, and when they become outdated they are destroyed and replaced by fresh ones closing up into realness, as models are just representations, after all.

To the dismay of scientists, a few of the phenomena studied today, such as the behavior of atoms, electromagnetic effects or the activity of nuclear forces they simply cannot be seen or measured by employing the instruments in the same usual way we do with other natural phenomena.  

electrochemical
experiment

That is, in order to observe and measure all physical phenomena in our daily objective realism, we merely employ our hands to manipulate the experiment or instrument and make use of our eyesight to establish the results of a classical measurement.

However, when studying progressively smaller objects employing high tech instruments that function as an extension of the human senses, the scientists suddenly found a limit to the observable reality of subatomic particles.

 (For example, a microscope is a technological extension of our eyes for visualizing minuscule objects, a radio telescope instrument is an extension of our ears throughout space).

In order to understand the events in particle physics, theoretical physicists nowadays do not merely observe and describe the natural phenomena but also abstractly recreate their formal functional structures, describing them with mathematical models whose variables can predict what happens when a given event undergoes any changes.

In the high energy physics laboratories, the scientists’ abstract thinking is combined to supercomputers in order to process an intricacy of data readings collected by the technological sensors (that have captured an atomic event and retransmitted the information as scientific statistical data to be compiled and theorized about.)

Any interpretation of a mathematical model that describes a studied phenomenon (or more than one) should be able to translate it into the language of words in order to form a provisional hypothetical explanatory description, albeit one that is longing for improvement towards a final theory.

The subatomic reality cannot be completely observed in a direct way (yet), but it can be calculated by employing mathematical constructions and symbolic notations to make up a model of how it works (as in quantum mechanics) and what is there, as in the symmetry models of subatomic particles (like the Standard Model); all attesting that mathematics is very effective in explaining with numbers the atomic manifestations that so far have remained intrinsically inscrutable.

In order to engage discourse to describe quantum physics principles such as virtual particles, energy fields or other dimensions, the scientific terminology consolidates the theory with its mathematical expressions and equations to describe and explain these strange abstract concepts. 

Theoretical physicists employ the mathematics we know today to formulate depictions of the phenomena that presently have no possible experimentations as yet, (that is, lacking the necessary technology to empirically carry out an applied physics experiment) and heuristically muster the contemporary scientific understanding in order to test and describe mathematically some esoteric theories of particle physics.

For instance, when we try to imagine the space-time between galaxies, this is a way to train the mind to become aware of the fourth dimension: our own language and the organizational functions in our brain have developed, from past to present, within the familiar three-dimensional world and the objective realism that is perceived by our senses. Therefore we can consider it to be extremely difficult to deal with the four-dimension reality of Astrophysics.

Physicists can "experience" the four-dimensional space-time world by way of the abstract mathematical format of their fourth dimension equations, but the visual-spatial translation and the language we currently employ are limited by the three-dimensional realm of the senses. 

Scientists claim that in the present-day vocabulary their new ideas do not translate well, and this makes us realize that we lack the necessary words to properly express the new “exotic” discoveries of the contemporary Sciences.

Some theorists, who strive to devise new hypotheses based on the observed phenomena and the collected numerical parameters, also endeavor to create and introduce new vocabularies and concepts to the scientific terminology so to overcome these gaps in language.

Nevertheless, according to the postulates of quantum mechanics, very small particles forming the Universe appear to have strange counter-intuitive properties that upset our common sense and even destroy causal logic, and there is no theoretical consensus explaining these weird discoveries.

How do we reasonably explain this new outlook on reality?

The findings of quantum physics experiments are interpreted by many rival theories. Presumably, human abstract symbolic thinking never lags behind Science because there is always someone out there to invent the equivalence solution between them. It is not intellectually possible for us to accept and live alongside the modern scientific discoveries about the natural world, while a deficient (or worse, unattainable) translation of a mathematically formulated theory into the language of words lingers on.

The main point is to explain it all without really resorting to mathematical terms so that everybody understands the meaning. It is the extended flexibility granted by modern language that gives us the audacity to do it, and reasonableness teaches us the method, combined with our abstract thoughts and creativity. All of these continually stimulate the imagination of scientists in the production of sophisticated combination models of mathematical abstractions to describe the invisible.

Is all we can know restricted to the perception of the senses only? Why is it necessary to know what we do not perceive? If we are using instruments to make measurements, then by definition we must be able to empirically measure and describe the properties of the studied object.

But how do we take measurements of the properties of microscopic objects we cannot measure? At the microscopic level, the objective realism method does not work.

What is the microscopic reality?

What do we really measure in an atomic particle?

How can we measure the properties of individual subatomic particles empirically, if they can only be calculated probabilistically?

- Or what we do actually measure are the effects of microscopic interactions between the particles and a measuring instrument?

If the properties of microscopic particles do manifest themselves as an empirically observable effect, theories like Quantum Mechanics can proficiently give us an accounting measure of the microscopic phenomena.

spectroscope

The readings of the results constitute themselves epistemological representations of the Objective Reality of Measurement that is given in microscopic real numbers, but not just the observed particle isolated properties, because the results emerge from the amplification of the individual interactions between the many particles and the measuring instrument employed; they are obtained from this summation.

The distortions and errors in the theory are due to the inaccuracy of the instrument and they are not inherent to the object measured, but are rather dispersions (instrumental error) and can be gradually reduced as we build better probes and improve techniques.

If an instrument is not sufficiently precise, we will manage to build an improved detector device to more exactly uncover the properties of the object, with the least possible distortion by error.

Despite the fact that we have not quite reached this next technological stage yet, a purely mathematical description of the atomic (electron) configuration is the paradigm that works for now, but then again, it does not explain the behavior of the subatomic particles.