Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Every Friday, I bring you a new and interesting scientific word to help us all expand our scientific vocabularies.  Today’s word is:

PHOBIA

I think we all have our own little, irrational fears.  I’m terrified of blood.  I once fainted in a biology class because we were talking about blood.  I think it was something about blood cells squeezing through capillaries in single file that set me off.

I recently spent some time researching various phobias for a writing project and learned that the technical term for my irrational fear is hemophobia.  Here are a few other interesting phobias.

• Pupaphobia: the fear of puppets.
• Aibohphobia: the fear of palindromes (it’s funny because aibohphobia is itself a palindrome).
• Omphalophobia: the fear of belly buttons.
• Hellenologophobia: fear of the ancient Latin and Greek languages, or fear of scientific terminology (if you are hellenologophobic, you probably shouldn’t be reading this blog).
• Sesquipedalophobia: fear of long words.
• Hexakosioihexekontahexaphobia: fear of the number 666.

So what’s your biggest phobia?  Do they have a technical term for it?  Have you ever managed to overcome your fear?  Please share in the comments below.

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Every Friday, I bring you a new and interesting scientific word to help us all expand our scientific vocabularies.  Today’s word is:

XYLOPHONE

Okay, xylophone isn’t really a sciency word, but it has a sciency word contained within it.  “Phone,” of course, means sound, but what about the “xylo-” part?  That comes from the Greek word “xylon,” which means wood, and there are lots of scientific terms that use “xylon” as a root, especially in the study of plants.

You might remember the words “xylem and phloem” from your 5th grade science class.  They’re sort of like the arteries and veins of plant biology, helping to transport water and other nutrients from the ground up to the treetops.

There’s also the term “xylophagous,” an adjective describing something that eats wood.  Termites, for example, are xylophagous insects.  “Xylitol” is a kind of sugar mainly found in birch tree sap, and it has the unusual property of being a sugar that is good for your teeth.  We also have the term “xylophobia,” the fear of forests or of objects made of wood.

“Xylene” is a category of petrochemicals originally discovered in wood tar, hence its name.  We now use it in solvents, paint thinners, and gasoline.  Some car enthusiasts add extra xylene to regular gas to create a higher octane.  I’ve read enough articles about how this can go horribly wrong, since xylene is a toxic and flammable chemical, so please don’t try this at home.

So the next time you hear a word with the prefix “xylo-” you’ll know what it means.  It’s fairly easy to remember too, given that we’re all familiar with the humble xylophone.  The only sad part is that the xylophone I had as a kid was made entirely out of plastic and therefore was not a xylophone at all.

P.S.: “Xylon” would make a great name for a race of wooden robots.  They could be the low-tech counterparts to Battlestar Galactica’s Cylons.

I recently saw an old Sci-Fi movie where one character uses the word “terabyte” as though this is some enormously large quantity of data.  And, of course, it is, at least here in 2013.  But the movie was set several centuries from now.  By that time, I doubt a whole terabyte would impress anyone.

Terabyte comes from a Greek word meaning “monster,” as in a terabyte is a monstrous amount of information.  It’s equal to one trillion bytes.  After terabyte comes petabyte, exabyte, zettabyte, and finally yottabyte.  The prefix “yotta-” comes from the Italian word for eight and means 1,000^8, so a yottabyte equals one septillion or 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 bytes.

And yet centuries from now, even a yottabyte might not seem like a lot.  It’s rumored that the NSA has already collected several yottabytes of data for its surveillance programs.  I suspect this is a slight exaggeration (emphasis on slight) but it does prove that the term yottabyte is already becoming part of our vocabularies.

So what comes after a yottabyte?  According to my research, yottabyte is currently the largest amount of data that we have an official term for, but some people have already proposed the word brontobyte for the next level.  I presume a brontobyte is so much data that it’s as big as a brontosaurus.

Sometimes stuff happens, and so I missed yesterday’s Sciency Words post.  Sciency Words is a series here on Planet Pailly where we take a look at some interesting scientific term and try to expand our sciency vocabularies together.  I usually post this series on Fridays, but this week I fell behind schedule, so I’m a day off.

So for the first ever Saturday edition of Sciency Words, our word today is:

MATHEMATICAL THEOREM

Last week, we talked about the difference between a scientific theory and a scientific law, or rather the lack of any real difference between them.  Neither one can ever be taken as 100% certain, but that doesn’t mean that one day a theory (like say evolution) will be discarded completely.  New theories seek to refine the old ones, not replace them outright.

Some degree of uncertainty is inherent in science, but that’s not true of mathematics.  Two plus two equals four.  The sum of the angles of an equilateral triangle equals 180 degrees.  Two parallel lines on a flat surface will never intersect.  These are incontrovertible facts.  Where scientists struggle with their imprecise theories and laws, mathematicians enjoy full confidence in what they call “theorems.”

You’re probably familiar with the Pythagorean Theorem, which states that a² +b² = c² when we’re dealing with the sides of a right triangle.  This theorem was first discovered by an ancient Greek philosopher named Pythagoras and has remained unchanged and unchallenged for over 2,500 years.  There are literally hundreds of ways to prove the Pythagorean Theorem (click here to see 99 of them), but that’s not really necessary.  Where in science we must perform the same experiment hundreds or even thousands of times and still have doubts, mathematics only requires us to prove something once.

So mathematical theorems are 100% certain in a way no scientific theory or law can ever be; however, we must keep in mind that these theorems apply only to our abstract concept of geometry and numbers.  Here in the real world, there are no perfect circles, no angles that are exactly 90 degrees, and no two lines that are perfectly parallel.  The real world is messy and imprecise, and so science remains our best tool for the study of the universe we actually live in.

Today’s post is part of a special series here on Planet Pailly called Sciency Words.  Every Friday, I bring you a new and interesting scientific word to help us all expand our scientific vocabularies.  Today, I want to do something a little different and take a look at two terms that we all probably know but are too often misunderstood.

SCIENTIFIC THEORY vs. SCIENTIFIC LAW

You may hear someone say, “Well, evolution is just a theory,” as though that means it’s a trivial thing, little more than guesswork.  A common misconception is that, if we really knew for sure, if there truly were no doubts, we’d call it a scientific law.  So since there is no “Law of Evolution,” that must mean the matter is still suspect.  Perhaps the whole evolution idea may one day turn out to be wrong.

I was taught in school that there are three levels of scientific certainty.  First comes the hypothesis, an untested idea based on scientific observations alone.  Next comes the theory, a hypothesis that has survived all the experiments we’ve tried thus far but is still “just a theory.”  Lastly, we have scientific laws, which are theories that have been proven beyond all possible doubt, that cannot be challenged or overturned, that are absolute, scientific Facts (with a capital F).

That’s a convenient hierarchy, one that was easy for my twelve-year-old self to understand, but it’s not actually the way things work.  There are several different definitions for scientific theories and scientific laws.  The distinction sometimes involves whether or not the theory/law uses mathematics.  Sometimes it’s a question of whether or not the theory/law describes some specific phenomenon or a more generalized view of nature.  And some experts will tell you there is no difference between them whatsoever.

The view I have come to accept is that the difference has more to do with the fashion of the time than anything else.  In the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, scientists generally called their discoveries laws (for example, Newton’s Law of Gravity or Kepler’s Laws of Planetary Motion).  Scientists in more modern times, such as Darwin (19^th Century) or Einstein (20^th Century), prefer to call their discoveries theories.  This may reflect a changing attitude among scientists who had come to realize that nothing in science is ever 100% certain.

So what happens when a law or theory is “disproven,” and what would happen if a new discovery seriously challenged the Theory of Evolution?  Well, when Einstein’s Theory of Relativity “disproved” Newton’s Law of Gravity, that did not mean that gravity suddenly went away.  We still use Newton’s law today because it’s a close approximation of the truth, at least until you approach a black hole or try accelerating to the speed of light.  Under those conditions, Newton can’t help you, mainly because he had no idea such things were even possible.

One day, we may learn that Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is only an approximation of the truth.  In fact, that’s already happened thanks in part to the discovery of DNA, something that Darwin didn’t know existed.  The result was not the end of evolution but the development of a new, more sophisticated theory, one that adds greater precision and detail to its predecessor.  We might call this the Theory of Genetic Evolution in order to distinguish it from Darwin’s original idea, but the basic concept remains the intact.

In science, nothing is proven beyond all possible doubt, but that doesn’t mean new theories completely replace the old ones.  One theory builds upon another and upon another.  Einstein built upon the work of Newton, Newton upon the work of Galileo, and so forth all the way back to the natural philosophers of Ancient Greece.  Science continuously makes new discoveries and refines its understanding of nature.  Whether we call these discoveries theories or laws doesn’t matter.  What matters is that science keeps evolving.

P.S.: Special thanks to Mark Ball for suggesting scientific theory as the subject for today’s post.  Please check out Mark’s website, Sci-Fi Ideas.  It’s a great place for both science fiction fans and science enthusiasts to muse over the many possibilities of our universe.

P.P.S.: The great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov once wrote an essay entitled “The Relativity of Wrong.”  Click here to read it.  It’s one of my favorite pieces on science, and it was a real eye-opener for me back when I still believed in that silly hierarchy of scientific certainty I’d learned in school.