Unit Conversion
On learning to speak English, learning to speak physics and the turmoil over whether we can all agree on what words actually mean
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Note: I wrote this essay before news of most recent immigration regulations concerning International students broke so this essay has been spared of the pain and anger I felt upon realizing how much animosity these new orders contain when it comes to people like me. However, if you are also an academic and are outraged by this issue, please do also think about how this is just another piece of the overall anti-immigration puzzle. All the fighting that some universities may be ready to do on behalf of their international population should also include other immigrants that have been previously similarly targeted.
There is one swear word in this letter.
UNIT CONVERSION*
As a language teacher and a translator, my mom is likely to catch me trying to pass off mispronounced English words as Croatian. A few conversations ago, she pointed out two instances: I had inserted an extra t into “empatičan” to make it sound more like “empathetic” and I turned “transport” into “transportacija” because the latter is more similar to “transportation”. As a Slavic language, Croatian does not have huge overlaps with the more Germanic English. Since I am from the northern coast of Croatia which has historically been rather influenced by its proximity to Italy, often the most I have in common with East Coast colloquial English is that back home we too mispronounce Italian food and swear words. However, over the past twelve years I stopped thinking about where the two languages that I am fluent in overlap and let them assume parallel tracks in the speaking part of my brain. I was pretty proficient in English when I first moved to the United States at sixteen so I barely went through the phase of actively translating everything in my head. I very quickly started less consciously soaking up and mimicking the language around me instead. And as my English rapidly improved, my Croatian did not deteriorate per se, but it did become, for the lack of a better word, less Croatian and more some Anglo-Slavic mash-up with an accent.
Whenever I’ve gone home in recent years and picked up the paper or tuned into nightly TV news, I saw and heard the same trend in speakers far more trained in formal language than I am. I’d hear “aplikacija” to mean application as in a request instead of the more traditional meaning as in an action of putting something to use. I consistently recognized the scramble of verbs, adverbs and nouns that i I would have probably been asked to reorder in middle school Croatian class, but that would be very amenable to a word-for-word translation into English. While I cut myself some slack for the way I occasionally botch my mother tongue – I use it rarely and most of my education has been in English – the fact that it is changing in similar ways but on a much larger scales points to something completely different. It reflects a power structure, a homogenizing force that brings us all to sameness by adaptation of the features of the most powerful among us. Some of the most powerful entities and people in the world speak English so languages that cannot compete with it simply become more like it.
As a small and funny example, I experienced the inability to fake English by mispronouncing Croatian the same way I can fake Croatian by mispronouncing English firsthand during a QuizBowl competition in high school. I buzzed in on a chemistry question just quickly enough to beat the other team’s player, but not quickly enough to fully process the answer in all of my languages. I knew the answer was nitrogen, but the English word escaped me. A referee that probably though they were doing me a favor encouraged me to just say it in my language, probably thinking they could determine whether I was correct by some vague feeling for similar sounds and phrases. They were really disappointed to hear me spit out “dušik” in a flustered manner, betraying the fact that the names of this particular chemical element in Croatian does not follow from Latin. The word is of Slavic origin instead: it “suffocates” a flame which invokes the verb “gušiti” and its less used cousin “dušiti, which means to suffocate. And I did feel a little out of breath from the embarrassment of having forgotten the English word and because of the disappointment of the judge who either didn’t realize Croatian was Slavic or just imagined all languages must be that much more similar English.
***
Audio: My husband and I trying to do tongue twisters in our respective languages
***
I feel a fair amount of guilt for slowly losing mastery of the language I grew up speaking as well as for giving in to a substitute language so quickly. Well-meaning yet misguided Americans will often compliment me on my fluency. As I write more and more, they are increasingly starting to point out to me that no one would ever guess that I am a taught rather than a native speaker. Though I understand that I should take some pride in this, these comments carry a touch of heartbreak within them. Hearing some of my older academic colleagues still speak with heavy accents and skip connective words or articles that don’t exist in their language even after years spent in American universities, I feel a bit of perverted jealousy. Of course, it is a professional risk to let your English be easily identifiable as distinct from that of American colleagues and academia is often rife with prejudice and stereotypes about foreign scholars anyway. At the same time, to me as another foreigner, encountering imperfect English in the workplace signals that my conversation partners get to speak their own language at home, that they still might be actively and animatedly partaking in their culture beyond what can survive the violence of the American melting pot.
***
“As perhaps you can imagine, ever since I started writing about food, I’ve wondered why translation hasn’t been a component of its media—not even three percent of it. It’s obviously a matter of resources, but it is first and foremost a matter of believing that what is produced in the United States doesn’t need to be accessible around the world and that what is being produced around the world in languages other than English isn’t worth the effort.”
Writer Alicia Kennedy on English’s dominance in food media in a recent newsletter.
***
Being a scientist only makes thinking about language, translation and the importance of either more salient. In many ways, doing science is about layers upon layers of translation. You have to translate your ideas into math or experiments and then translate the results of calculations or experimental data back into language. Sometimes that language is jargon, sometimes it is what we somewhat patronizingly call plain which adds another step of translation. The language you use to speak to other scientists is often completely unintelligible to not only non-scientists, but also scientists in other fields or even subfields of your own. Is something a Majorana mode or a Majorana fermion? Is something an analog of a gravitational system or does it just have the same underlying symmetries? Can we say a system has finite size if we assume it is thousands of atoms long? Can we say that it is infinite? Many conceptual problems in physics are language problems as well. Famously, the way we talk about quantum wavefunction collapse quite literally has repercussion for how we think about the nature of reality. Yet, even the founders of quantum mechanics noted that there simply may be quantum phenomena for which our minds, used to classical physics, cannot find correct words for.
Content of physical theories themselves includes elements of translation as well. An “edge” of one theory gets mapped or translated to another in the ever growing and ever more famous framework of holography. We attempt to handle interacting systems by discussing quasiparticles – they are really not particles, but the math is similar and the word particle so useful that we just put “quasi” in front of it. We conjecture a black hole can maybe be translated from a light-capturing system to a sound-capturing system, a mute hole in a cold atomic setting in a lab instead of something far away in space. We look at abstract momentum space of a physical system that extends in a real, tangible space and discuss the topology of this unreal conjugate (momentum) of something that is real (space). Experts put pictures of bagels and donuts on their colloquium talk slides to explain what topology is - they’ve translated real space to mathematical momentum space then looked at its structure and jumped to language more suited to a bakery than theoretical physics. Physicists are in many ways master translators, and master mixers of different dialects and languages that exist in science. I have done this in my research too; the one project I am still working on requires translating motion along a chain of atoms into a series of matrix multiplications that then get translated into a set of curves on the surface of a torus. There are two translation steps involved and I’ve been stuck on this project precisely because I don’t know how to run the translation backwards (from the torus to the matrix).
As physicists, we see the pragmatic value of this: if I can call something a particle then I may be able to guess what it will do next because there’s some standard knowledge for what a particle can and cannot do. When encountering a new system or a new problem, we try to employ familiar language to incentivize our brains to use familiar intuition and reliable past knowledge. If you hang out with enough other scientists, you find that this need for familiarity seeps into how we discuss everything else as well. There are phrases like “order of magnitude” and “first order approximation” that we work into random conversations because they have, through habit, become integral to how we process everything around us. My husband, not a physicist but well-versed in statistics, will throw out “variance” or “orthogonal” at me without thinking twice about how much this betrays our shared space deep within the academic bubble. A few weeks ago, we got back into the old argument on whether tacos are sandwiches and he didn’t even wince when I tried to formulate an argument based on the topology of the contested food items. We’ve similarly argued on what makes a pizza a pizza in the language of factor analysis (him) and eigenvector decomposition (me). It’s nerdy and idiosyncratic, but it also shows just how much language becomes a foundation of how we think. We default to the familiar -because it starts to seem universally intuitive – even in the most inconsequential of situations. Every time my mom points out an English word that has sneaked into my Croatian, I find myself thinking about what kind of familiarity or habit that reflects as well.
I’ve been told in the past, very early after my move to the United States, that I may sound so rude, and so cold, because my empathy doesn’t translate well from Croatian to English. Other foreigners would expose the flipside of that coin for me when recounting their own English-learning experiences: they’d tell me that to learn American English is to learn how to be fake polite and sugar-coat. In college, I would sometimes say to new friends or colleagues that “we’re just rude in Eastern Europe” to avoid having to have that particular language conversation later down the line. I’ve since gotten better at pleasantries and niceties and euphemisms, but I don’t think changing my language in this way made me more warm or empathetic. What it did do, mostly, is to make me self-aware, self-conscious and vigilant about the fact that the way I speak like a foreigner might also convince others that I probably also think like a foreigner. I am reminded of learning quantum field theory form a string theorist, then trying to learn its applications from a condensed matter physics expert – when one or the other used some word you could usually tell that they were thinking about it in relation to very different systems. When I learned to sound more polite in English, I didn’t necessarily learn how to be more polite, but my thinking about politeness in general and politeness as related to myself changed.
While having had this experience with language and learning language makes me somewhat more attuned to how others use and learn it, I am also aware that the lack of context for a word or a phrase can leave me vulnerable to confusion and malice. Croatia is fairly homogenous and most foreigners that reside in it are short-term tourists. When I was growing up it was a common prank that if you came across a non-native speaker trying to pick up some local dialect, you’d teach them a swear words and say it means something nice so that they’d get in some embarrassing situation later. In college, a famous math professor told me about reclaiming the joke – a colleague from ex-Yugoslavia did teach him some fairly inappropriate stuff and her retaliated by sometimes shouting it on the Chicago subway and seeing the heads of the not-so-rare ex-Yugoslavian expat turn in outrage. However, misunderstanding a swear word in a foreign language can be easily remedied because “fuck” carries the same valence in most cultures and Google Translate picks up on its crudeness. But what about more complicated words? What about vaguely racial slurs, about the name of that Washington football team, about who gets dubbed a “racist” instead of saying they use “racially charged language” in newspaper headlines, about what “defund” and “abolish” mean, about what “cancel” translates to on the internet?
***
Neutral objectivity trips over itself to find ways to avoid telling the truth. Neutral objectivity insists we use clunky euphemisms like “officer-involved shooting.” Moral clarity, and a faithful adherence to grammar and syntax, would demand we use words that most precisely mean the thing we’re trying to communicate: “the police shot someone.”
Pulitzer Prize winning reporter Wesley Lowery on what the word objectivity should mean to journalists today in a New York Times op-ed titled A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists
***
I often think back on how many other international students there were in my US History class in high school. Much of what I learned there was later revealed to me to be not exactly correct. Still, it strongly colored the way I think about America. In that class I learned about America and I learned to speak about America within the same framework. When I learned that some historical facts were more complicated than the interpretation that had garnered me A’s, I had to figure out how to change the way I spoke about them to reflect that complexity. As the national conversation continues to center the way in which America deals with its past, the markers of that past, and the echoes of it that are painfully evident in the inequities that are all around us, it feels like many of my non-foreign counterparts are going through the same process. Even if we leave the context of history and try to center on the present, the way language is used still primarily shows what people’s preconceived notions are and how they think about themselves as a part of, or in opposition to, the issues and systems they are describing. Just think of everyone who is trying to say that “abolish police” means “heavily reform police” and everyone else that is quick to point out that, no, they really mean “abolish” as in “get rid of” and “dissolve”. Living in a house where watching Sunday shows is almost a thing, I’ve certainly caught glances of pundits and hosts sincerely asking the same question. Similarly, the question of what we should call someone that made major contributions to a very idealistic vision of a new nation yet owned slaves to some folks seems as troublesome as how to use a classical physics word for a quantum phenomenon. Somehow most of us are speaking a slightly foreign language when compared to those around us and somehow most of us are terribly bad at translating.
Defining and re-defining language is, in a way, an ongoing, collaborative project. We’ve made some positive strides, like with normalizing singular they more over the last few years, Many more conversations about words actually being important and necessitating correct phrasing not being a sign of oversensitivity are certainly taking place more than they used to. However, as new pockets of language are built, it seems crucial to remember that not only does being able to speak it or not often reflect a power differential (based on where you grew up, how much money you have or even how often you’ve been given a chance to speak at all). Even among people with seemingly similar backgrounds, we use language in ways that reflect who we think we are. Speaking to another person is always a little about learning their language and reaching consensus. Understanding then often involves an effort in translation from both sides. That translation can very personal because it can require that we move from thinking about our words based on who we think we are to thinking about them based on how somebody else may see us. This is difficult. For people in power, those that publish papers or make laws or write official statements sent to everyone at some university, it is also frequently unwelcome. On a recent episode of the Longform podcast, there is an amazing moment when the executive editor of the New York Times, in real time, realizes that diversity and inclusion are not synonymous. This is a person whose job fundamentally involves words, but also a non-trivial amount of power.
After over six years of teaching physics, and an outlook for probably teaching more of it in the future, I have learned to be very deliberate with how I talk in the classroom. If you teach a student that a vector is an arrow, then they’ll have a really hard time thinking about a wavefunction in some abstract space as a vector too. Instead the, it is better to use language that is more precise and less simplified even if it may require a lot more explaining and a lot more examples. If you teach students that electronic spin means that an electron is like a little charged marble that is actually spinning, in a later class they might learn enough electromagnetism to prove that this is physically impossible. Instead you have to take the confusing route of acknowledging that while we do use the word “spin”, we should not let ourselves think about something actually physically spinning. The difference between an object having a rotational degree of freedom that makes it mathematically similar to a spinning top and the thing actually being a spinning top is subtle and takes time to get used to. However, it is in the long-term worth investing time into parsing that confusion and preventing badly designing an experiment or incorrectly setting up a calculation in the future.
Sometimes I wish that folks who taught me words like “meritocracy” or “objectivity” or maybe even “independence” and “freedom” took the same time to consider the confusion I might encounter when finding them embedded in some troublesomely complicated contexts.
Best,
Karmela
* Physically meaningful quantities in physics typically come with a set of units. In the same way a kilogram expresses how much mass an object has, a Joule measures its energy and a Tesla the strength of its magnetic field. However, different settings and systems make it desirable to use different units i.e. a change in what one-standard-something means. For instance, an electron inside an atom typically carries energy much, much smaller than a single Joule so physicist use another unit, called an electronvolt, to express energies of electrons inside of atoms in a more self-contained way. An electronvolt is defined as an amount of energy an electron specifically carries as it interacts with one unit (volt) of electric potential and there is a formula that details how to convert between Joules and electronvolts. Similar unit changes and conversions are found for other physical objects and quantities.
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ABOUT ME LATELY
LEARNING July snuck up on me and I’m having a hard time remembering most things I’ve done this summer so far, let alone in the past week. I took another pass at editing my dissertation and finally filled out all of the paperwork for having it officially deposited. I delayed this process as much as I could and kept securing teaching research and teaching positions after my defense back in February, but now my lease is about to expire and my husband has had his own defense and has a start date for his new job so it is time for me to move on. I spent a whole day re-formatting my very long bibliography and another filling out various forms. Turns out the end of a PhD is as unglamorous as the bulk of it.
On the research front, journal referees have returned comments on one of the papers I co-authored recently. In an almost cartoonishly typical fashion one was very complimentary while the other rather directly called our interpretation of our own calculations wrong. I guess you count your wins where you can and write extensive resubmission letters otherwise. I have also continued to intermittently obsess over quasiperiodic transfer matrices, this week looking into something called an NAK decomposition on the suggestion of a collaborator but did not make much progress. I am as used to this as I am used to conflicting referee reports and will also continue trying.
READING This incredibly comprehensive resource on the meaning and definition of racism.
This thread deconstructing an article about Thai fruits in the New York Times, pointing out instances of bias and colonial thinking.
A recent newsletter by Raechel Anne Jolie summing up some particularly strong points about the abolition and transformative justice movement. She writes
“Abolition is as much about building as it is about destroying. It’s a growing, what Ruthie Gilmore describes as “presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Abolition names that the current system (settler/racial patriarchal capitalism) does not meet the needs of the people and that, yes, it must be completely dismantled, but also we want to build and nurture things in its place that address the root causes of harm. Abolition is an anti-capitalist, decolonial project that aims to heal the wounds that drive people to harm and to challenge what we do and don’t deem “criminal.” Abolition reminds us that poverty is more violent that selling weed, or smashing a window. Abolition reminds us that hurt people hurt people. Abolition reminds us that the current system is not interested in helping prevent harm, only in punishing it.“
Sonia Feldman’s poem “5,000 Prostitutes in Erice” reflecting on an ancient temple of Venus where sailors would come to sleep with the priestesses in exchange for money.
This issue of the Written Out newsletter on the power of stories we tell to ourselves and others. Author Kelsey McKinney writes
“We can write about the things we haven’t dealt with, but not well.
Writing is a form of processing. Febos says this in her piece: “Whereas writing was once an exercise in transcription, it has become an exercise in transformation.”
Maybe we write over and over again, redrafting and restructuring and reimagining, in order to find the truth within ourselves that we don’t want to confront, or at least can’t confront on the first try. But we edit to make sure that truth is there, to make sure that the reader gets it, to try and see if we can maybe —if we’re lucky— show the processing we’ve done. The hope, I guess, is that the writing helps us find truth and that maybe, in the most optimistic world, our processing can help someone else along too.”
The Melissa Febos essay she references is really great too. It is nominally about writing sex scenes while aware of all the silent and not so silent forces that influence the way we think of ourselves in relation to sex, but also about the much greater project of undoing those forces in general to make ourselves more wholly human in our own eyes. Febos writes
“A big part of making creative decisions is relying upon what I guess we can call instinct—the intelligence of the imagination, the spirit, maybe, what we used to call the muse. A big part of instinct is just the cultivated habits that we refer to as skill. However much talent I had as a graduate student, the intelligence of my imagination could not communicate itself very clearly until I had spent some years practicing how not to indulge my strengths and weaknesses alike. This instinct may not be acted upon with great momentary consciousness, but the years of consciousness that cultivated it stand in for that.
What I am interested in ferreting out are those other instincts, the ones we have inherited or practiced for reasons other than our good writing, the communication of our imaginative intellect. Which brings me back to sex: so much of writing that describes it is still performing unconsciously, still comprised of a series of decisions that were not so much made by the writer but by the matrix of inherited values that inform the reader’s own beliefs around the acts.”
LISTENING This electronic jam composed on a Commodore Amiga computer in 1990. I was never really a video game kid nor did I ever own a Gameboy, but something about this combination of sounds is still familiar and nostalgic. And it really does make you feel like you’re about to either watch an amazing 90s anime with a questionable dub at a friend’s house or jump into your own highly pixelated adventure. Queer writer Carmen Maria Machado on the Nancy podcast talking about writing horror stories about the pandemic before the pandemic actually happened.
WATCHING We finished watching Atlanta and I continued to be invested in and amazed by this show. The penultimate episode of season 2 features a very heavy handed and possibly unnecessary use of suicide as a plot device. I was bothered by this though the episode itself did establish some of the emotional stakes the rest of the season was hinting towards. The finale of the second season built on the emotional charge of this preceding episode while also calling back to elements of the show from all of its previous run in a way that again made me slightly inclined to forgive Atlanta its few transgressions. I do hope it comes back for season 3.
Out of TV inertia, we started watching the third season of the Netflix show Dark and honestly I think I’m only sticking with it out of some misguidedly sick completism. The first season of this show used a suggestion of time travel to make us think about whether people ever actually change and what may or may not be predetermined for all of us. The second season tried to pick up on these themes but lost some of the momentum by introducing to much actual time travel and way too many storylines. The third season introduces even more time travel and a parallel universe. It is bad. And it uses obviously incorrect physics (I remain convinced that every science fiction show can benefit from being more vague about how its “magic” works scientifically) to be bad which only makes it worse.
EATING:
Rosemary roasted yellow and gray squash, tri-color quinoa and a radish, carrot and cucumber salad with a lemon miso dressing and cumin cayenne toasted pepitas.
Sweet potato white bean patties with peanut sauce, blistered shishito peppers and a red cabbage, kale, mango and lime salad.
Rice noodles in tahini sauce with cilantro and scallions, sticky sesame cauliflower (incredible sauce recipe from Vegan Richa), cold soft tofu (based on this recipe but with sambal instead of bean paste).
Beyond burgers, grilled vegetables with hummus, oil-and-vinegar herby potato salad and almond cookie cashew cheesecake bars with berries (I adapted the base from this recipe, using a tablespoon of ground flaxseeds mixed with three tablespoons of warm water and mixed until gel-like in place of the egg).
A chickpea flour and caramelized onion “frittata” with spicy sweet potato wedges and massaged kale.
My mother-in-law’s famous pasta in red sauce with cauliflower, without cheese and with added beans for me (because I need protein too) and a small watermelon.
Red cabbage, cilantro, scallion and lime slaw, chipotle tempeh crumble, lime cilantro rice, garlicky cashew cream, avocado slices and (beer) “drunken” white beans.
Blueberry peanut butter (only because we ran out of tahini) breakfast smoothies that feel like shakes, endless jars of overnight chia puddings with rolled oats mixed in on some days but not others, slices of sad store-bought bread toasted and smothered with peanut butter the studded with banana slices when I’m feeling incredibly lazy after my early morning runs, way too much percolator coffee because this week we ran out of both Turkish style grounds and whatever my husband was using for the French press we discovered in New Jersey.
I’m improvising a lot and writing down little, so I have no original recipe to share this week. If you are curious about any of the above, however, definitely let me know.