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POSTERMINARIES
Plain Text You just can’t win an argument with an English professor. “Let’s at least agree,” I said, seeking some common ground from which to stage my next attack, “that the primary function of language is to transmit information?” “Oh, no, no, no: not at all.” He managed to convey a vague sort of surprise at my naïveté, with barely a shrug of the shoulder or a twitch of an eyebrow. “Much, if not in fact most, of the time, the real purpose is to obscure information.” I was about to protest that in science, at least, we are not in the business of obscuring information, but then I realized that this is sadly not true. Sometimes we obscure the facts through incompetent use of our media, and sometimes we do it deliberately. And sometimes the passage of time just makes papers harder to read, as the commonly accepted standards of communication change. The beginnings of the scientific age occurred in an era when all learned literature (at least in Western Europe) was published in Latin. Presumably this allowed access to those of a certain class while excluding the riffraff. Newton’s great work Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, or familiarly to some, I suppose, just The Principia) was published in Latin in 1687. It only became necessary to translate it into English more than 40 years later, in 1729, due to a widespread decline in Latin skills, or an actual need to convey information. His next book, Opticks, was published in 1704 in English (of a sort). This is perhaps the 18th-century equivalent of a movie being released, in the first instance, on video instead of having a theatrical opening. No Latin edition? Quid facet mundi? (What is the world coming to?) Reading Opticks in its original form might be a challenge to the young scientists of today, though. Even the title has an archaic spelling, and it gets no easier after that. Still, it took another few hundred years before the great universities of Oxford and Cambridge ceased to require all of their undergraduate students to be proficient in Latin; and by the mid-20th century the writing was pretty clearly on the wall (and in plain English). As progress always accelerates, it only took a few more years before Oxbridge science students were released from any language requirements at all. English had replaced Latin as the lingua franca of science. Robert Hooke was a contemporary and rival of Newton’s, and their battles over the ownership of precedence in a number of discoveries are legendary. As time went 72
by, Hooke learned from Newton’s consistent victories that it was essential to stake your claim unequivocally, so when he conceived the theory of elasticity, he took pains to write it down and established at least one great tradition of scientific prose. Ut tensio sic vis—obscure enough in its pristine Latin terseness, but even if you could translate it properly to “as the extension, so the force,” it is still one of the earliest examples of statements that are only comprehensible if you already
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