Comment by gsf_emergency_4 2 days ago
In order to explain his impact to people, someone could find a friendlier name for "gauge"?
Some say that list of stylists would not be meaningful without von Neumann (although Dyson might say that frogs have no style*)
https://youtu.be/OmaSAG4J6nw?t=24m19s
Please see next slide for a minimal example of a "real(!) gauge field", even if you don't like philosophy of physics.
Sorry: gauge-field.
It's poetic and you can pardon the french but the combination is alien.
Poetry is hard: a poetic way to say "co-ordinate transformation" or "tensors" could help students to calculate with them. I'd suggest "shear-squeezing-your-xray-lens" for everything but I fear the backlash from teachers because that would take a doctorate (or more) to unpack!
The problem you run into is that laypeople operate with modified Aristotelian physics. They might "know" that the speed of light is a speed limit, and they might "know" that quantum mechanics says you can't measure anything.
They also believe that objects keep moving after you push them because they retain a memory of your push, and when that force runs out the objects come to rest*
You are not, will not, cannot teach them how to do a meaningful modern calculation in a single conversation**. Hell, Feynman's lectures were a failure: they didn't serve the audience he was supposed to be teaching (first year students).
So are you talking to students? Or is this a cocktail conversation? Because those are two very different settings.
*&**) These points are extensively documented in the PER literature. SciComm is really important and really useful, but it's not the same as effective pedagogy.
It's named that for a reason. It has to do with invariance under an arbitrary selection of parameters like scale, hence, choice of railroad gauge.
At least they tried to give a descriptive name! Most ideas are named after the people who are most closely associated with them. Yang-Mills. Newtonian. Euclidean. Planck. Many of those names invoke very specific ideas, even though eponyms are about as opaque as they come.
> friendlier name for "gauge"?
Do you suppose small-gauge railroads are too niche an interest? Or is "gauging" interest not friendly?
It's abstractions all the way down, but the term was coined in its still generally used definition of "scale". To explain the concept to the general public, keep it simple and poetic. If they want to unpack your metaphor, they're going to need a few years of university physics education!