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Comment by pedrosorio | Hacker News Reader

But you should expect her to retain the ability to browse a dictionary, no?

Assuming it was in the dictionary. We're not talking about a time when going to webster's dictionary website was really an option, as in the internet wasn't really much of a thing still, at least not in my area. They had the ability to dial into their e-mail (a BBS called First-Class) via modem, that was about it. The dictionary in the library was about 5 inches thick and probably 25 years old, I doubt it had 'quark' in it.

This is completely at odds with my memory of 1998.

Not only did people use online dictionaries, but we also used online maps (mapquest.com), movie listings (moviefone.com), greeting cards (bluemountain.com) and hundreds of other online services. Netscape had already hit its peak and was on its way down. High school textbooks spoke of the internet. I don't think I knew students who hadn't used instant messengers like Yahoo!, AIM or ICQ.

I was in a town of about 100,000 people in Colorado.

Fits well with my memory of rural MO in 2000

It takes a theory at least 10-15 years to make it into university textbooks, let alone a general English dictionary.

Keep in mind that monks in Carolingian France knew the Earth was round in the 8th century. It took a few hundred years for this knowledge to work its way into popular literature (but was present by at least the 13th century). If the paper had been thrown out, this would have made a great topic for a follow-up.

8th century nothing. It was known in ancient times. Eratosthenes correctly computed how big it was around 240 BC, and Posidonius confirmed his measurements in the 1st century BC. The story of how a certain Christopher Columbus came to read these results 1700 years later and disregard them is fascinating[1]

What I don't understand is, if there was such confusion over units, why didn't they simply use known values for the distances involved? I imagine angles weren't a problem. Or, god forbid, do their own measurements now that they had the technique? If it was repeatable to that degree of precision 240 years apart nearly 2000 years earlier, I should have thought they could at least settle the gross magnitude error that misled Columbus.

[1]1http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Columbus#Geographic...

> 8th century nothing. It was known in ancient times.

I was referring specifically to the pattern of how long it took in the Middle Ages for literature folks to get ahold of the idea. The fact is those 8th century monks got the idea from classical sources.

The subtext of the paper would be "you English teachers can't expect to know about scientific discoveries of the last couple hundred years, can you?"

I still have my high-school dictionary, and it has this entry:

quark n. (Phys.) one of several (orig. three) hypothetical components of elementary particles.

That's from the 7th edition (1982, reprinted 1984) of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, about the size of a thick hardback novel.

Granted, there's not much there, but enough to prove that a student's not just making something up.

to be fair, she DID take the trouble to approach a science teacher on a subject she didn't know much about, instead of making a grading decision with insufficient knowledge.

Absolutely, and given that Gell-Mann was corresponding in 1978 with editors at the OED, it's likely that said English teacher (if she had an ounce of self-respect (I speak as a teacher myself)) would have had at least a relatively recent dictionary in her possession, and would have found quark in it. Still, kudos to her for at least caring enough to ask the science teacher.

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