Language Barriers Make Knowledge Barriers

 Of course for those who can’t read English there will be additional problems. Analysis shows, for instance, that:

Throughout the 20th century, international communication has shifted from a plural use of several languages to a clear pre-eminence of English, especially in the field of science. This paper focuses on international periodical publications where more than 75 percent of the articles in the social sciences and humanities and well over 90 percent in the natural sciences are written in English. The shift towards English implies that an increasing number of scientists whose mother tongue is not English have already moved to English for publication. Consequently, other international languages, namely French, German, Russian, Spanish and Japanese lose their attraction as languages of science. Many observers conclude that it has become inevitable to publish in English, even in English only.

Here is the graph taken from globaldev blog publication "Removing language barriers for better science":

Figure 1: Shares of languages in science publications, 1880–2005: overall average percentage for biology, chemistry, medicine, physics, and mathematics. Sources: Tsunoda 1983; Ammon 1998; the author’s own analysis, with the help of Abdulkadir Topal and Vanessa G. Figure from: Ammon, U., 2010. p.115

In countries such as France, where great emphasis is placed on everyone speaking the same language, and the language is held up as the proof of allegiance to “French values”, (whether that is consciously or unconsciously felt by the population), and where the educational system is such that languages are mostly taught following archaic methods which usually prevent citizens from being able to have even simple conversations with English speakers, even after years of English lessons at school, there is a serious and growing isolation caused by the very small number of French people who learn English. This is dangerous to science in France and ultimately dangerous to France itself. 

One of the main examples of this is the statistical evidence that France is at least 40 years behind other Western countries in social and humanistic sciences. In the top 100 world universities, France has four entries in the rankings: PSL University (Paris Sciences & Letters) comes in as 26, Institut Polytechnique de Paris as 48, Sorbonne as 60, and Université Paris-Saclay comes in at 69. That is a shocking fact for the country that is the home of “liberte, egalite, fraternite.” Of the top 10 universities in the world, 5 are in the U.S., 4 in UK, and one in Switzerland (ETH). If France intends to catch up, it’s going to have to speak English.

P.S.1 31-03-23 Reading now with excitement  R. Beneduci, F. Schroeck "Space localization of the photon" (2019):

Abstract

Starting from the phase space representation of quantum mechanics we provide an Euclidean system of covariance for the photon. In particular, we consider systems with the Poincaré group as the symmetry group and use a standard procedure in order to build a phase space and a localization observable on the phase space. Then we focus on the massless representations of the Poincaré group that we use to build a space localization observable for the photon.

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