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Comment by 1cvmask | Hacker News Reader

The alien rat pack of STEM:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Martians_(scientists)

My favorite interaction is of von Neumann with Shannon regarding the coining of entropy:

What von Neumann Said to Shannon When Shannon first derived his famous formula for information, he asked von Neumann what he should call it and von Neumann replied “You should call it entropy for two reasons: first because that is what the formula is in statistical mechanises but second and more important, as nobody knows what entropy is, whenever you use the term you will always be at an advantage!

http://www.spatialcomplexity.info/what-von-neumann-said-to-s...

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When one uses an existing word, it carries a lot of epistemic and ontological baggage, thereby causing trouble to those who are new to the domain. That’s why scientists go for a linguistic reform: invent a new word during a conceptual or scientific revolution. That’s how the word “Oxygen” replaced the old “Phlogiston”.

When defining statistical entropy in his Cambridge lecture course on Coding and Cryptography, Thomas Korner adds the following footnote:

"It is unwise for the beginner and may or may not be fruitless for the expert to seek a link with entropy in physics."

https://www.dpmms.cam.ac.uk/~twk/Shan.pdf

Does Landauer's principle not already create a very strong link between the two? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landauer%27s_principle

It even predicts a direct equivalence between the unit of bit and Joules per Kelvin with the entropy produced in the erasure of a bit being equal to 9.6e-24 J/K

Unless I'm making some mistake, you can even use computer science principles combined with Landauer's limit to solve Maxwell's Demon.

The link was established quite early and it wasn’t fruitless:

https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/articles/theory.1.pdf

My least favorite example of this is statistical "significance" which gives the impression of importance. I can't think of a word that has caused more trouble in science than that.

Recent HN discussion on the Martians of Budapest :

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28726489

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