▲ | weinzierl 5 days ago | |
"What's happening here, as happens so often in other situations, is that a term of art was created to describe something complicated; [..] Later, people uninvolved with the popularization of the term took the term and tried to define it from first principles, arriving at a place different than the term of art." Happens all the time in math and physics but having centuries of experience with this issue we usually just slap the name of a person on the name of the concept. That is why we have Gaussian Curvature and Riemann Integrals. Maybe we should speak of Jung Memory Safety too. Thinking about it, the opposite also happens. In the early 19th century "group" had a specific meaning, today it has a much broader meaning with the original meaning preserved under the term "Galois Group". Or even simpler: For the longest time seconds were defined as fraction of a day and varied in length. Now we have a precise and constant definition and still call them seconds and not ISO seconds. |