Planet Pailly

Welcome to another episode of Sciency Words, a special series here on Planet Pailly where we take a closer look at the definitions and etymologies of science or science-related terms so we can expand our scientific vocabularies together.  Today’s term is:

QUBIT

I’m starting to think I can get used to just about any weird quirk of language.  When I first saw the word qubit, referring to the quantum bits inside a quantum computer, I’m pretty sure my eye twitched.  The spelling of that word… it just looks so… so wrong.

And I’m not the only one who to feel that way.  In a paper titled “From Cbits to Qbits,” American physicist N. David Mermin laments that “the prevailing ‘qubit’ honors the English rule that q should be followed by u but ignores the equally powerful requirement that qu should be followed by a vowel.”  Mermin would prefer the spelling qbit.  I would prefer the hyphenated form q-bit.  Unfortunately, neither of those options seem to have caught on.

So who is responsible for this crime against English spelling rules?  It was another American physicist by the name of Benjamin Schumacher, who originally introduced the term in this 1995 paper on quantum information theory.  In the brief acknowledgements section at the end of the paper, Schumacher explains: “The term ‘qubit’ was coined in jest during one of the author’s many intriguing and valuable conversations with W.K. Wootters, and became the initial impetus for this work.”

As a writer, I kind of identify with Schumacher here. I’ve had the experience many times of either learning a new word or inventing one, and having that spur fresh and exciting new thoughts.  But still, why is the word spelled that way?

Several other sources (including Wiktionary) say the word qubit is formed by analogy with cubit, the ancient unit of measure equal to the length of an adult male’s forearm (from elbow to fingertips).  There is a certain inherent uncertainty involved in cubit-based measurements, given the amount of variation there can be among adult male forearms.  So I guess connecting that to all the inherent uncertainties of quantum science and quantum computing makes a sort of sense.

I don’t know.  Maybe I’ve gotten so used to seeing the word spelled the way it’s spelled that it doesn’t bug me as much as it used to.  And knowing a little about the word’s history, and its apparent association with the cubit, probably helps to make the weird spelling a little more palatable for me.  But what about you?  Are you okay with qubit, or does that weird spelling make your eye twitch when you see it?

So I sort of screwed up my blogging agenda for this past week.  I just had too much other stuff on my mind, and I guess I needed time to sort things out in my head.  Such is life!

At least it’s good stuff, for a change. Writing stuff. World-building stuff.  I’m not sure how much I want to reveal at this point; but since this is a Friday, and since we usually talk about the definitions of science or science-related terms on Fridays, I’ll tell you about one thing.  It has to do with the definition of science fiction.

Or to be more precise, it has to do with the definitions of hard and soft science fiction.  Hard science fiction tries to portray science as accurately as possible, while soft science fiction takes more creative liberties (sometimes a whole lot more creative liberties) with scientific facts.  Pretty much every work of science fiction lies somewhere along a spectrum between hard and soft Sci-Fi.  Or at least that’s what I always thought these terms meant.

But then a week ago, I read an article that seemed to be defining soft science fiction in a way that didn’t make much sense to me.  I can’t find that article now (thanks for trying, Google), but when I turned to my trusty copy of Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, I found that yes, indeed, soft science fiction (and by extension hard science fiction as well) can be defined in two very different, almost contradictory ways.

To quote from Brave New Words, soft science fiction may be defined as “science fiction that deals primarily with advancements in, or extrapolations based on, the soft sciences (e.g., anthropology, psychology, sociology, etc.).”  And hard science fiction is, therefore, science fiction dealing with the hard sciences, like astronomy, physics, or chemistry.

So instead of being two ends of a spectrum that encompasses all of science fiction, hard and soft science fiction are merely two subgenres among a host of other subgenres like cyberpunk, space opera, alternative history, etc….  And weirdly, according to these new (or at least new to me) definitions, soft Sci-Fi is just as concerned with scientific accuracy as hard Sci-Fi.  It’s merely a different branch of science that it’s trying to be accurate about.

Maybe this is old news to some of you, but for me this has been a huge revelation.  Redefining hard and soft science fiction has been a major factor in all the re-thinking, re-writing, and re-world-building I’ve been doing this week.  However, this is not the big, central idea that’s been on my mind.  It’s more like a satellite thought orbiting that big idea, and its gravitational perturbations are being felt.

I’m going to leave it at that for now, but I’m sure I’ll have more to say in the coming weeks and months.  My IWSG post this coming Wednesday should be interesting.