A friend and I were chatting about terms and phrases and how they move between communities and often are find different meanings. There’s one in physics that is probably generally useful, but I don’t think I’ve seen it used of physics.
Wolfgang Pauli was noted for colorful phrases. Folklore has it that a colleague showed a young physicist’s paper to Pauli looking for constructive comments as he felt it wasn’t terribly good. After reading it Pauli returned it without written annotations - he just said "Das ist nicht nur nicht richtig; es ist nicht einmal falsch! - “That is not only not right, it is not even wrong”. The shorter version “not even wrong” is in common use in physics to describe a proposition that claims to be scientific, but is broken at some fundamental level like logical fallacy.
It's appropriate for flat and new Earth conjectures, vaccination causes autism, homopathy, much of what the President and his people say, and so on...
a useful phrase
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