The Nontrivial Drinking Game

Let's play a drinking game: As you sit quietly in your physics classroom, studiously scribbling notes and doing your utmost to keep up with the professor, take a long draw from your hip flask every time you hear the word "trivial."

Every. Time.

In my experience, you'd be passed out drunk by the end of a typical lecture.

What am I on about? In physics (and mathematics, and chemistry, and who knows how many other scientific fields) we have developed our own dialect. It may not be apparent at first, until pay attention to how often you run across phrases like "to first order...", "without loss of generality...", or "in the limit..." These all mean a great deal scientists, but very little to everyone else. They are terms of art.

But there are other phrases that creep into our dialect... far more insidious phrases. "By simple manipulations...", "after some trivial algebra...", "it is obvious that...", are all commonly used to describe things that are not simple, trivial, or obvious to most people. I've even had professors describe proofs and examples in class as "simple-minded."

Typically, we use these phrases to describe long, tedious algebraic manipulations that we aren't inclined to reproduce on the board or the page. By describing them as "trivial," what we really mean is "time-consuming" -- there are only so many minutes in the lecture, so much space on the page, and we'd much rather focus on the set-up and results than the greasy, grimy machinery in the middle.

But here be dragons, because it's in the middle where many students have the most trouble. "The middle" is where minus signs go to die, it's where factors of 2 drown their sorrows with that missing sock from the dryer. The algebraic manipulations, approximations, limits, and assumptions that form "the middle" of many derivations in physics are far more complicated than we make them seem with words like "trivial", "obvious", or "simple-minded."

This may seem like semantics -- but there is real harm to be done. For a student struggling to understand a concept, hearing that it's "trivial" is hugely demoralizing. It's a taunt. Even now, after seven years of studying physics I struggle with the feeling that I shouldn't be here, that I'm not good enough to have advanced as far as I have: Things aren't as trivial as everybody else makes them out to be.

They call it "the impostor syndrome," and I'm certainly not alone in feeling this way.

What's more -- we lose nothing by eliminating words like this from our parlance. Saying a problem or bit of mathematics is "trivial" only serves to alienate those who struggle to understand it. It provides no useful information whatsoever. It is, in fact, quite the opposite of teaching.

I'm certainly not the first person to rail against these words and phrases. Matt Landreman wrote an excellent opinion piece in the pages of Physics Today titled "A Nontrivial Manifesto" that I encourage you to read. The only reason I am adding my voice to this matter is that we are far from resolving it. Seven years since that article was published, I still hear these words spoken from the blackboard.

We learned to speak this way, and it's high time we un-learned these phrases. We have to wipe them from our unique dialect, or continue to suffer the consequences. Physics is a non-trivial matter -- that's what makes it so damned interesting. There is tedium, but it's skilled, worthwhile tedium. We should acknowledge, not dismiss, the hard work involved in understanding our subject and developing the skills to master it.

If you've read this far, I hope you take my words to heart. If you are a graduate student, teacher, or professor - do your best to police yourself. Print off Landreman's excellent article and circulate it around your department. If you are a student, talk to your professors about how unhelpful words like "trivial" are in the classroom. If we work together, I believe that small changes like this will make the physics class room that much less intimidating