Interactional linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that studies how language functions in social interactions. It combines insights from linguistics, sociology, conversation analysis, and discourse analysis to explore how people use language in real-time communication. The focus is often on the nuances of spoken interaction, including the ways in which language constructs social meaning, identity, and relationships among speakers.
The term "nearest referent" is often used in the context of linguistics, semantics, and discourse analysis. It refers to the closest entity or concept that a pronoun, demonstrative, or other referring expression points to within a given context.
Attributional calculus, often referred to in the context of reasoning and inference systems, is a formal framework used to model and manipulate complex relationships between events, entities, or concepts. Although not a widely recognized term in standard mathematical literature, the concept can generally relate to reasoning about causation and the attribution of causes and effects within a logical framework.
Phi features, often referred to in the context of genetic modifications or advanced biotechnology, can represent a variety of concepts depending on the specific field of study or application. However, in a general sense, "Phi features" might not refer to a widely recognized or established concept as of my last training cut-off in October 2023.
Phrase structure rules, also known as rewrite rules, are a set of formal grammatical rules used in generative grammar to describe the structure of phrases and sentences in a language. These rules define how symbols (which can represent words, phrases, or other grammatical constructs) can be combined to form larger grammatical units. The basic idea is that phrases can be generated from smaller constituents based on these rules.
Pseudogapping is a syntactic phenomenon in linguistic theory, particularly within the field of generative grammar. It involves a type of ellipsis where part of a verb phrase (often including a verb and certain complements or adjuncts) is omitted, while some parts remain overt. This results in a structure that gives the appearance of a gap but does not neatly fit into traditional ellipsis patterns like gapping or sluicing.
Dynamic semantics is a theoretical approach to understanding the meaning of linguistic expressions that focuses on how context and discourse evolve over time during communication. Unlike static semantics, which views meaning as fixed and derived from the lexical and grammatical properties of expressions alone, dynamic semantics considers how the meaning of sentences can change based on the discourse context and how they interact with previous statements.
Dubnium is a synthetic chemical element with the symbol Db and atomic number 105. It is named after Dubna, a town in Russia where the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research is located, and where the element was first synthesized in 1968 by a team of Russian and American scientists. Dubnium is a member of the actinide series, and it is placed in the d-block of the periodic table's group 5, which makes it part of the transition metals.
Lawrencium is the chemical element with the symbol Lr and atomic number 103. It is classified as a synthetic element and belongs to the actinide series of the periodic table. Lawrencium was first synthesized in 1961 by a team of scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and it was named in honor of Ernest O. Lawrence, the inventor of the cyclotron.
The strongest are:
- early 20th century: Annalen der Physik: God OG physics journal of the early 20th century, before the Nazis fucked German science back to the Middle Ages
- 20s/30s: Nature started picking up strong
- 40s/50s: American journals started to come in strong after all the genius Jews escaped from Germany, notably Physical Review Letters
Much before atoms were thought to be "experimentally real", chemists from the 19th century already used "conceptual atoms" as units for the proportions observed in macroscopic chemical reactions, e.g. . The thing is, there was still the possibility that those proportions were made up of something continuous that for some reason could only combine in the given proportions, so the atoms could only be strictly consider calculatory devices pending further evidence.
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) chapter 5 "The reality of molecules" has some good mentions. Notably, physicists generally came to believe in atoms earlier than chemists, because the phenomena they were most interested in, e.g. pressure in the ideal gas law, and then Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics just scream atoms more loudly than chemical reactions, as they saw that these phenomena could be explained to some degree by traditional mechanics of little balls.
Confusion around the probabilistic nature of the second law of thermodynamics was also used as a physical counterargument by some. Pais mentions that Wilhelm Ostwald notably argued that the time reversibility of classical mechanics + the second law being a fundamental law of physics (and not just probabilistic, which is the correct hypothesis as we now understand) must imply that atoms are not classic billiard balls, otherwise the second law could be broken.
Pais also mentions that a big "chemical" breakthrough was isomers suggest that atoms exist.
Very direct evidence evidence:
- Brownian motion mathematical analysis in 1908. Brownian motion just makes it too clear that liquids cannot be continuous... if they were, there would obviously be no Brownian motion, full stop.
- X-ray crystallography: it sees crystal latices
Figure 1. Still from A boy and his atom by IBM. Source.
Less direct evidence:
- 1874 Isomers suggest that atoms exist
- kinetic theory of gases seems to explain certain phenomena really well
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 40 mentions several methods that Einstein used to "prove" that atoms were real. Perhaps the greatest argument of all is that several unrelated methods give the same estimates of atom size/mass:
- from 1905:
- in light quantum paper
- enabled by experimental work of Wilhelm Pfeffer on producing rigid membranes
- 1911: blueness of the sky and critical opalescence
Subtle is the Lord by Abraham Pais (1982) page 85:so it is quite cool to see that organic chemistry is one of the things that pushed atomic theory forward. Because when you start to observe that isomers has different characteristics, despite identical proportions of atoms, this is really hard to explain without talking about the relative positions of the atoms within molecules!
However, it became increasingly difficult in chemical circles to deny the reality of molecules after 1874, the year in which Jacobus Henricus van't Hoff and Joseph Achille Le Bel independently explained the isomerism of certain organic substances in terms of stereochemical properties of carbon compounds.
Was the first model to explain the Balmer series, notably linking atomic spectra to the Planck constant and therefore to other initial quantum mechanical observations.
This was one of the first major models that just said:
I give up, I can't tie this to classical physics in any way, let's just roll with it, OK?
It still treats electrons as little points spinning around the nucleus, but it makes the non-classical postulate that only certain angular momentums (and therefore energies) are allowed.
Bibliography:
- Inward Bound by Abraham Pais (1988) Chapter 9.e Atomic structure and spectral lines - Niels Bohr
- The Quantum Story by Jim Baggott (2011) Chapter 3 A Little Bit of Reality
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
- topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculusArticles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
- a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. - Infinitely deep tables of contents:
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact






