Can you write a history of the universe using the 1,000 most used words in the English language??

[Kirsten]

That's the challenge that astrophysicist Roberto Trotta set himself. NPR's Wade Goodwin interviewed him this morning on Weekend Edition: http://www.npr.org/2014/09/21/3503160...

[Micah]

Quote: "JOE INCANDELA: If we combine the ZZ and Gamma-Gamma in the region of 125GV, they combine to give us a combined significance of five standard deviations.

(APPLAUSE)

GOODWYN: For the non-physicists, it's not clear why everyone's clapping. What did he say? The problem is jargon."

The problem isn't the jargon--that announcement was made to a room full of physicists and science journalists who all understood what was said--the problem is that science journalists are generally pretty bad in making the jargon understandable, and the general public has an attention span trained by texting and twitchy smartphone games.

And the problem is that jargon serves a purpose; a lot of things physicists deal with are impossible to explain in terms other than a) mathematics, of b) metaphor. The former is impossible to understand unless you're a professional mathematician or physicist, and the latter is really inaccurate and easiliy misinterpreted.

I don't think the project was totally pointless...but I did find it odd that the Weekend Edition bit didn't give any examples of the actual work. For example, how would he have changed the announcement of the Higgs boson energy level being discovered? We don't know from the article. Pretty sloppy reporting.

[Mary]

Watch me!

"Stuff happened. After that, other stuff happened. Then things happened."

I didn't say it would be a GOOD history