New ideograms for physics

Pablo García-Risueño 1, Apostolos Syropoulos 2, Natàlia Vergés 3

1) Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Zum großen Windkanal 6, 12489 Berlin, Germany; risueno@physik.hu-berlin.de

2) Independent scholar, Xanthi, Greece; asyropoulos@yahoo.com

3) Ars Didactica, C/ Major 2, Besalú, 17850 Girona, Spain.

AbstractIdeograms (symbols that represent a word or idea) have a great communicative value. They refer to concepts in a simple manner, thus making it easier theunderstanding of complex ideas where such concepts appear. In addition, ideograms simplify the notation, which is often cumbersome for equations at the fieldof physics. We propose ideograms for essential concepts of physics, like electron, photon or phonon. They are designed to be intuitive, and their goal is to makethe reading of equations more comfortable. Our symbols are included in a publicly available LATEX package.

The usefulness of ideogramsIdeograms are present in communication codes that we use daily. Examples of ideograms are the digits 0, 1,. . . , 9, mathematical symbols (like+,−, %, ·,×,√, ∈), emoticons, traffic signs or commercial logos. Symbols that represent a word are present in English (e.g., think of @, $ or &) and areubiquitous in other languages with many speakers, like Chinese, Korean, and Japanese.

Ideograms present several advantages with respect to words written using an alphabet. Ideograms imply a better and faster comprehension [1], while conceptsrepresented with ideograms are better identified and recalled [2]. When reading a word written in an aplhabet, we need to make up the sequence of soundsthat corresponds to it; however, with an ideogram the meaning can be directly understood. An example of the superiority of ideograms is that the humanmind identifies a concept like “hand” on a cartoon of a hand more quickly than on a photograph of it [3]. The advantage of ideograms can be gauged bymerely comparing the ease of reading numbers (1, 2, 3,. . . ) vs. their written names (one, two, three,. . . ) [4]. The features of ideograms are also illustratedby the surprising fact that there exist people with neurological injuries who cannot read texts written with phonetic signs, but can do it if the text is written withideograms [5].

The reasons just described encouraged us to develop ideograms for basic concepts of physics. Despite the close link between mathematics and physics,ideograms are ubiquitous in mathematics, but shyly used in physics. In particle physics some symbols are traditionally used, but to the best of our knowledgethey were not included in a LATEX package to date.Equations of physics are often very complex and thus demand very heavy notation. With these ideograms we hope to make equations easier to understand, aswell as more elegant. Our ideograms are designed to be intuitive, easy to identify and to remember. To ease their identification, some of our designs containthe initial letter of the word that they represent. Since it is a LATEX tradition to use the Computer Modern fonts, we have based our designs on these fonts,nevertheless, these symbols should be usable with any other mathematics font.The ideograms that we propose are included into the svrsymbols LATEX package that can be downloaded from www.ctan.org/tex-archive/fonts/svrsymbols.

List of proposed new symbolsThe list of ideograms includes, among others, these characters:

Experimental v

Error q

Method A

Assumption u

Reference l

Spin (down) o (Z)Orbit B

Fermion c

Photon b, L

Electron a

Proton d

Neutron g

Hole h

Phonon j

Exciton i

Polaron k

Plasmon p

Solid t

Graphene s

Atom C

Nucleus e

Ion f

Surface z

Water r

Positron m

Antiproton n

Antineutron y

(Anti)quark O (E)Up (anti)quark U (K)

Down (anti)quark R (H)

Top (anti)quark T (J)

Bottom (anti)quark P (F)

Charm (anti)quark Q (G)

Strange (anti)quark S (I)

(Anti)muon x (w)

(Anti)neutrino N (M)

We welcome suggestions for additional new symbols.

References[1] A. P. Shinamura, The American Journal of Psychology 100, 15 (1987).[2] S. Park and T. Y. Arbuckle, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory 3(6), 631 (1977).[5] T. A. Ryan and C. B. Schwartz, American Journal of Psychology 96, 66 (1956).[4] B. D. and M. Coltheart, Neuropsychologia 17, 467 (1979).[5] S. Sasanuma, Brain and Language 2, 369 (1975).