How English Became the International Language of Physics

This is an unusual post for me. I am writing a second edition of my book “The Big Ideas of Physics and How to Teach Them”. I am including a new chapter on literacy in physics. Each of my chapters begins with a short history of the concept, so I thought I’d do the same with the languages used to publish physics discoveries since the middle ages. Hopefully you’ll find it as interesting as I do!

If you’d like to read more, I strongly recommend the book Scientific Babel by Michael Gordin (2015).

If you enjoy the stories behind the physics (often very strange stories), you can’t do better than Richard Brock’s wonderful Stories from Physics published by the Institute of Physics (free pdfs here: https://spark.iop.org/stories-physics).

How English Became the International Language of Physics

8th to 14th Century: The Islamic Golden Age

During the medieval period, Arabic was the world’s scientific language. Under the leadership of the Abbasid Caliphate, scholars in Baghdad’s House of Wisdom translated classical Greek, Persian, and Indian texts. They went far beyond translation, making key discoveries in medicine, astronomy and optics centuries ahead of Europe.

Example Text: Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen): Kitab al-Manazir (Book of Optics, c. 1011–1021) — Published originally in Arabic.

Middle Ages to the Early 19th Century: From Latin to National Languages

Latin served as the main academic language for European scholars. However, by the 1600s, early works in scientists’ own languages began to emerge as they attempted to reach broader audiences.

Isaac Newton is an example of the transition from Latin to national languages. He published his masterwork on gravity and mechanics (The Principia) exclusively in Latin because he wanted to ensure it was read by the elite mathematical minds of continental Europe.

However, when he published Opticks less than two decades later, he switched to English. By writing it in English, Newton moved beyond the world of universities, claiming national pride for British experimentalism, and making the text accessible to common instrument makers and glass-grinding artisans who did not know Latin.

Examples

• Nicolaus Copernicus: De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (1543) — Published in Latin.
• Galileo Galilei: Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) — Published in Italian.
• Isaac Newton: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) — Published in Latin.
• Isaac Newton: Opticks (1704) — Published in English.
• Émilie du Châtelet: Institutions de Physique (1740) — Published in French.
• Luigi Galvani: De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari commentarius (1791) — Published in Latin.
• Alessandro Volta: On the Electricity Excited by the Mere Contact of Conducting Substances (1800) — Published in French.
• John Dalton: A New System of Chemical Philosophy (1808) — Published in English.
• Hans Christian Ørsted: Experimenta circa effectum conflictus electrici in acum magneticam (1820) — Published in Latin.
• Michael Faraday: Experimental Researches in Electricity (1831) — Published in English.

When Luigi Galvani published his discovery of “animal electricity” in 1791, he chose the traditional Latin. 9 years later, his academic rival Alessandro Volta disproved animal electricity using a battery publishing in French, the language of diplomacy. Volta actually published his paper as a letter to the Royal Society in London, but wrote it in French to guarentee continental readers.

Émilie du Châtelet, a French aristocratic woman, fought her way into male dominated 18th Century scientific society. Her most significant scientific contribution was to challenge Descartes’ concept of “force” (an early confusion of momentum and energy) as mv. She showed, using the recoil of a projectile fired from a boat, that “force” is equal to ½ mv2 and proposed that total energy was conserved as well as total momentum.

 Du Châtelet also translated Newton’s Principia into French, but she did far more than simply translate: she was the first to adapt Newton’s geometric calculations into the more powerful mathematics of calculus. 

“Judge me for my own merits, or lack of them, but do not look upon me as a mere appendage to this great general or that renowned scholar, this star that shines at the court of France or that famed author. I am in my own right a whole person, responsible to myself alone for all that I am, all that I say, all that I do… I confess that I am inferior to no one.” Émilie du Châtelet

For more on du Châtelet, I highly recommend: https://spark.iop.org/collections/stories-physics-energy-and-thermal-physics 

Another iconoclast was Michael Faraday. He was born as a working-class blacksmith’s son who began his career as a bookbinder’s apprentice. He had no classical education, could not speak Latin and didn’t have a foundation of complex mathematics. This forced him to write his discoveries on electromagnetism in completely plain, non-mathematical, descriptive English. His use of clear everyday English allowed his work to be understood by engineers and public enthusiasts launching a huge interest in physics. His lectures at the Royal Society in London became so popular that they caused traffic jams. 

Mid-19th to Early 20th Century: French, German and English

Scientific communication settled into three dominant, competing languages. To remain up-to-date, scientists had to be fluent in English, French, and German (with German dominant in physics and chemistry).

Examples

• James Joule: On the Mechanical Value of Heat (1843) — Written in English.
• James Clerk Maxwell: A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field (1865) — Written in English.
• J.J. Thomson: Cathode Rays [Discovery of the Electron] (1897) — Written in English.
• Albert Einstein: Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter Körper [Special Relativity] (1905) — Written in German.

British experimentalists like Joule and Thomson firmly established English as the dominant language for thermodynamics and early atomic structure. Meanwhile, theoretical developments in thermodynamics, radiation, and relativity shifted toward Germany, making German as the language for anyone wanting to study the cutting edge of theoretical physics.

Late 19th to Early 20th Century: Artificial Scientific Languages

Mastering three separate languages was exhausting and inefficient. Scientists seriously debated creating adopting artificial, neutral constructed languages like Esperanto and Ido (a streamlined version of Esperanto designed for scientific communication). These languages ultimately failed due to rising national rivalries. Sadly, few significant physics papers were first published in an artificial language though Nobel Prize-winning chemist Wilhelm Ostwald heavily championed and personally funded constructed languages.

Example

• Wasaburo Oishi: Raporto de la Aerologia Observatorio de Tateno (1926) — Published in Esperanto.

The paper above is by the Japanese physicist and meteorologist Wasaburo Oishi. He published his discovery of the jet stream in Esperanto. Due to his language choice, it was barely read. The jet stream was rediscovered by American meteorologists in 1944 US when bombers were blown off course by the jet stream during raids over Japan.

Post-World War I to 1930s: The Fall of German

Anti-German sentiment after WWI led Western scientists to boycott German journals. However, because the quantum mechanics revolution was happening almost entirely in Central Europe, physicists secretly continued to read German.

Examples

• Ernest Rutherford: The Scattering of Alpha and Beta Particles by Matter and the Structure of the Atom (1911) — Written in English.
• Niels Bohr: On the Constitution of Atoms and Molecules (1913) — Written in English.
• Niels Bohr: Über die Serienspektren der Elemente (1920) — Written in German (published in Zeitschrift für Physik).
• Enrico Fermi: Sulla quantizzazione del gas perfetto monoatomico [Fermi-Dirac Statistics] (1926) — Written in Italian (and simultaneously translated to German).
• Enrico Fermi: Tentativo di una teoria dei raggi $\beta$ [Theory of Beta Decay] (1933) — Written in Italian (and German).

During this period, scientists who wanted the world to read their research on quantum theory published  in German. The Italian physicist Enrico Fermi began his career fiercely determined to revitalize Italian physics. In 1926 he published his paper first in Italian (Rendiconti Lincei). Knowing that the international physics community would largely ignore Italian, he translated and published it in German (Zeitschrift für Physik) just a few months later.

This dual-publishing strategy was common. In 1933, when Fermi wrote his groundbreaking theory on Beta Decay, he actually submitted it to the British journal Nature in English. Infamously, Nature rejected it for containing “speculations too remote from reality.” Fermi republished it in Italian (Nuovo Cimento) and German (Zeitschrift für Physik).

1933–1945: The Nazi Purge

The end of scientific publishing in German came when the Nazi regime dismissed Jewish and dissident scientists from German universities, forcing them to emigrate to the US and UK. This led to the rise of English as the dominant scientific language. Einstein, Bohr, Schrödinger, Meitner, Born, Szilard, Fuchs and Fermi and many other men and women were forced out of continental Europe. These physicists began publishing in English.

Post-World War II (1945–1970s): The Cold War Divide

After the war, German scientific infrastructure was completely destroyed. The global scientific community divided along superpower lines, publishing either in English or Russian. An industrial scale translation programme was developed by each side to ensure neither was left behind. 

Examples

• Enrico Fermi et al.: Experimental Production of a Chain Reaction (1952) — Written in English.
• Nikolai Basov & Aleksandr Prokhorov: Papers on the development of the maser/laser in Zhurnal Eksperimental’noi i Teoreticheskoi Fiziki (JETP) (1954) — Written in Russian.

1980s to Present Day: The Rise of English

The current English dominance was cemented when long-standing national European journals voluntarily surrendered their native languages to survive. Prestigious publications in France and Germany either merged into English-only international groups or only published papers written in English to preserve their global relevance and impact. Today, English has become the modern equivalent of medieval Latin: the global standard.

Example

• International Physics Collaborations: Observation of a New Particle at the LHC (Discovery of the Higgs Boson) (2012) — Written in English.

After the fall of the Soviet bloc, the Russian publishing and translation industry could not survive. It was broken up and bought by western publishing organisations. Now almost all Russian science is published in English.

What Next?

It is difficult to imagine the fall of English as the dominant language of science, but history suggests it will happen. I’d love to see a truly international artificial language develop, but I think Chinese is more likely.

I hope you found that interesting!

Ben