There's also a convention regarding work energy in thermodynamics; both camps treat heat energy going into a system as positive, but the English-language literature usually treats work energy coming out of the system as positive, while the non-English literature uses the opposite convention: http://www.fun-engineering.net/askleo4.html On Thu, Aug 25, 2016 at 8:08 AM, Mike Stay <metaweta@gmail.com> wrote:
Particle physicists use the opposite convention for the metric as those studying relativity. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sign_convention
On Wed, Aug 24, 2016 at 9:30 PM, James Propp <jamespropp@gmail.com> wrote:
What's the canonical example of two scientific communities that have adopted mutually inconsistent sign-conventions? (Do physicists and electrical engineers describe electric fields using different sign conventions, maybe?)
This relates to my most recent "bizarro arithmetic" post inasmuch as Martinez seems to be inviting us to imagine that normal and bizarro arithmetic could be set up as separate self-consistent systems, with a dictionary that lets you convert true statements in one system into true statements in the other. I'll believe it when I see it...
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-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com
-- Mike Stay - metaweta@gmail.com http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~mike http://reperiendi.wordpress.com