Topology and physics

✍ Scribed by Mark Feshbach

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1989
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 434 KB
• Volume: 192
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-4916
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-4916(89)90118-8

✦ Synopsis

A few months ago I was asked to speak at a fest honoring my father. I had also been invited to visit Germany for 2 months. Well, I know very little physics or German. The first thing I did in preparation for my trip to Heidelberg was to buy a good English-German dictionary. Unfortunately there was no mathematics-physics dictionary. So I have created the beginnings of one here.

Certain words mean the same thing in both subjects. Thus it is easy to translate group or say Lie algebra. This can give one a sense of confidence. I am reminded of a short story in the New Yorker a number of years ago. An american visits Italy for the first time and discovers that he really knows Italian, despite never having studied it. Finally at the end of the day he decides to take a cold shower, turns on the faucet labelled caldo, and ends up in the hospital.

Of course we need not worry about such dire consequences. Nevertheless one does run across examples of this phenomenon. An example is field, which has many meanings in mathematics. We translate only one of these.