From akriman@darwin.helios.nd.edu Sun Dec 31 08:42:50 2000 Received: from mxu2.u.washington.edu (mxu2.u.washington.edu [140.142.32.9]) by lists.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.05/8.9.3+UW00.12) with ESMTP id IAA25028 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 08:42:49 -0800 Received: from mailspool.helios.nd.edu (mailspool.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.7]) by mxu2.u.washington.edu (8.9.3+UW00.02/8.9.3+UW99.09) with ESMTP id IAA27220 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 08:42:49 -0800 Received: from darwin.helios.nd.edu (darwin.helios.nd.edu [129.74.250.114]) by mailspool.helios.nd.edu (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id LAA16728 for ; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 11:42:47 -0500 (EST) Received: (from akriman@localhost) by darwin.helios.nd.edu (8.10.1/8.10.1/ND-cluster) id eBVGgmN05696 for classics@u.washington.edu; Sun, 31 Dec 2000 11:42:48 -0500 (EST) Date: Sun, 31 Dec 2000 11:42:48 -0500 (EST) From: Alfred M Kriman Message-Id: <200012311642.eBVGgmN05696@darwin.helios.nd.edu> To: classics@u.washington.edu Subject: Latin and Greek for kids I long ago realized that I am a man of one book, and I have endeavored to shield the list from this particular one of my perversities. The book is Laura Fermi's biography of her husband Enrico, _Atoms in the Family_. I've rationed myself to citing it about once every eighteen months, and I'm due now. When Enrico was 14, his dear brother Giulio died very suddenly and unexpectedly. Enrico sought the consolations of natural philosophy. He would save his allowance to buy physics and math books at the Wednesday flea market in Campo di Fiori. After a brief disquisition on Italian noses, Laura Fermi picks up the story (p. 19) ... | On coming home after a purchase, Fermi showed it to his | sister, whose inclinations were literary, philosophical, and | religious, but definitely not scientific. Vainly he tried to | make Maria share his own enthusiasm! Once he brought home from | Campo di Fiori a two-volume treatise on mathematical physics, and | he told his sister that he was going to start reading it right | away. During the next few days Maria was often interrupted in | her studies by her brother's increasingly excited remarks about | the book: | "You have no idea how interesting it is. I am learning the | propagation of all sorts of waves!" | "It is wonderful! It explains the motion of the planets!" | His enthusiasm reached a peak when he arrived at the chapter | on the recurrence of ocean tides. Finally, he got to the end of | the book, and then once more he went to his sister: | "Do you know," he said, "it is written in Latin. I hadn't | noticed." | The book was by a Jesuit physicist, a certain Father Andrea | Caraf[f]a, S.J., and had been published in 1840. Both Enrico and | [his friend and companion in scientific study Enrico] Persico | continued to hold the opinion that it was a good book. The physicist Emilio Segrč, in _Enrico Fermi, Physicist_, gives similarly measured praise of the book that his friend "the pope" (Fermi) had found so wonderful as a teen (p. 8): | ... a fairly good text at the university level on mechanics, | optics, acoustics and astronomy as these were known in 1840. It | also includes a mathematical introduction in which calculus is | explained in the style used in the eighteenth century--lacking | rigor but possessing a certain algebraic virtuosity. Fermi must | have studied the treatise very thoroughly, because it contains | marginal notes, corrections of errors, and several scraps of paper | with notes in Fermi's handwriting. The two volumes gave Fermi a | solid foundation for his future studies. I did not recommend _Elementorum physicae mathematicae_ earlier this month when John Traupman at SJU posted that Wimbledon Publishers is > ... interested in all aspects of the Classics, especially > in books that could be used in the classroom at any level-- > elementary to graduate. and I do not do so now, because I suspect the market for a reprint would be rather limited. It is available in libraries, however, and those who tutor individual students might keep it in mind. I have only scanned the first volume, which covers elementary mechanics and acoustics. I'd say that large parts of that, particularly the mechanics, could be used safely today, with or without a desirable minor updating of the notation. Today in Italy a student headed for a scientific career does not have the opportunity to study Greek in the public schools, but in Fermi's time college-preparatory secondary education was oriented strongly to literature and languages, and Greek was compulsory. Emilio Segrč had something to say about that too (p. 6). | I do not remember that Fermi ever referred to his Latin | studies, but many years later, at Los Alamos, I complained one day | that the night before I had dreamed of a final liceo examination | in Greek, to which he remarked that he had suffered similar | nightmares. One filament of the "Greek for kids" thread has been the intrinsic interest (or not) of the reading material. I mention Fermi's and Persico's interest in the Caraffa book to remind those selecting reading material that for some students, fiction is lame and nonfiction exciting. Dan Tompkins wrote > --the audience is also important. What would happen if we set up Greek > classes not to train the few dedicated individuals--those most like > ourselves--on a campus, but to bring the language to a wider group? I think > we'd find ourselves gravitating to Crosby & Schaeffer, Athenaze, or possibly > JACT. .... or perhaps something really different. Departments of French, German, and Russian often offer courses in scientific translation. These courses have a practical appeal, but some register because the reading material is interesting. A pedagogical advantage of scientific text is that the vocabulary tends naturally to be very limited, and the preferred style of science has for centuries been plain -- unornamented and direct. Also, the logic of the underlying science constrains the possible meanings, and so functions as a kind of hinting (which may or not be a good thing instructionally, depending on use). For at least these reasons I expect, and in practice I find, that science is the easiest thing to read in any foreign language. In effect, passages from science textbooks have pedagogical virtues akin to passages from Caesar. Last Dec. 12, Mark Williams commented > And my fave work of secondary scholarship, bar none: Curtius's ELLMA. > I read somewhere (article by Jan Ziolkowski?) that this is the only work > of humanistic scholarship that regularly turns up on the > computer-generated top-ten footnote frequency lists. All the other > works cited in these lists are from the natural and social sciences. As MW's comment implies, citation practices vary greatly across the disciplines. Citation research rarely compares citation rates across the boundaries separating science, social science, and humanities. A simple general observation gives one a feel for the scale of citation rates, based on familiarity with ordinary papers: in a research field with a reasonably stable population, citation practices and publication rates, two averages are mathematically required to be equal (precisely equal if the stability conditions are precise). Specifically, the average number of works cited per citing work must equal the average number of times that a work is cited in other works. I would expect that history papers and law reviews would swamp works in other fields, because their citation practices are promiscuous. Of course, the distribution of citations is bimodal, because a large fraction of works is never cited (25-50%), and a few important works are frequently cited (in the sciences, typically the top 1% of papers receive 40% of citations). For a long time and possibly still, for no reason that I could ever determine, one of the "highest-impact" (~most-cited) journals in the sciences, according to Eugene Garfield's citation research, was _Acta Crystallographica_. It's a respected journal among geologists and frequently cited by chemists, but not extraordinary by any means. Some may wonder why I touted secondary literature like Caraffa's instead of important landmarks like the Latin works of Gilbert, Kepler and Newton, such as I mentioned only last month, or for Greek something almost up-to-date like Euclid's _Elements_. My reason is related to citation practices, and it could do to be more widely appreciated: science is not about texts, and scientists readily abandon primary works. The essence of the most important works is absorbed, errors are discovered, better presentations are developed, and the works themselves cease to be cited or much read. The process begins immediately: for example, as Schrödinger was reading Einstein's paper on relativity, one of his strongest impressions was that it could be reformulated more simply. The late Bram Pais, Einstein's best biographer, mentioned in a 1979 or '80 colloquium that AE's most cited paper was one on molecular size determination [[1]], and that most of the citations were in the literature of the dairy industry. It turns out that results in that paper are used to determine fat content in milk; dairy researchers were apparently so tickled to be able to cite him that they did so at every opportunity (*). Four of the fifty most cited papers in science are Einstein's, but one of them is a 1911 correction of an algebra error in the Brownian motion paper, and none of them is his E=mc^2 paper. The disappearance of explicit references to fundamental work, named the obliteration phenomenon by Eugene Garfield, has been expressed thus by Moravcsik [[2]]: ``Anybody who cited Einstein's original [Annalen der Physik] paper when he writes [sic] E=mc^2 would be laughed at.'' Even the limited extent to which the primary literature of science is referenced overstates the degree to which that literature is actually read. P. J. Wyatt made the following interesting point [[3]] about a paper by G. Mie [[4]] which in 1961-75 [[5]] was the second-most-cited old (1896-1921) paper in physics and physical chemistry (almost twice the citation rate of AE's most cited paper). The paper is normally cited as the origin of the formulas for Mie scattering, which in fact appear in an earlier paper by Lorentz. (I'm not even going to get into the bitter subject of naming a phenomenon and ideas in ignorance of earlier and often superior work, as in the cases of Brownian motion, Buys Ballots Law, and the Dirac delta function -- much though I admire P. A. M. Dirac.) Another well-known phenomenon (referred to in a paper by Rolf Landauer, I think, which I can't find now) is the propagation of transcription errors in citations. This is possible, of course, because the citers are simply copying citations from recent papers rather than looking at the originals. Whether or not the original expressions of important ideas are discarded is one of the sharpest contrasts distinguishing science and literature. Scientific texts can be summarized, restated, translated, improved, used, understood to all purposes completely. Continuing reference to an original formulation, the continued study of the work of a Kant or Aristotle in the original or at all, is a fair sign of its failure to achieve something like scientific utility or validity. [And to pass from the sublime to the ridiculous, I am reminded of Gadamer's _Truth and Method_, where early on it is suggested that science is about texts. (My copy is fugitive; you can look it up for me if you want to argue the point.) It is the first clear indication (this one not so egregious, if _science_ is understood in the limited sense of _historical science_) that he couldn't recognize science if it came close enough to bite him on the posterior nonanalytics. What *is* it this weekend that is making so many of us so testy?] Ho, hum -- I wish everyone a glorious yet pleasant new millennium. [[1]] A. Einstein, "[A new method of determining molecular dimension]," _Annalen der Physik_, vol. 19, pp. 289-306 (1906). I just checked Science Citation Index, and it has increased its lead factor in citation rate over AE's other papers. [[2]] M. J. Moravcsik, "Measures of Scientific Growth," _Research Policy_, vol. 2, pp. 266-75 (1973). [[3]] P. J. Wyatt, "How Lorentz might have viewed the computation of the angular functions occurring in his theory," _Applied Optics_, vol. 13, pp. 2751-2752 (1974). [[4]] C. Mie, "[Contribution on optical properties of turbid solutions, with special reference to colloidal metallic solutions]," _Annalen der Physik_, vol. 25, pp. 337-445 (1908). [[5]] C. Oppenheim and S. P. Renn, "Highly Cited Old Papers and the Reasons Why They Continue to be Cited," _Journal of the American Society for Information Science_ vol. 29, pp. 225-231 (1978). .