Photons, Flux, and Some Light on Philology

Abstract

Abstract Many articles have appeared in recent years recommending or defining terminology and units for measuring radiation energy in experiments with plants. A large group of these publications (1, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 19, 22, 23) present the units and nomenclature which have been agreed upon, and promoted by, the American Society of Agronomists (ASA), the American Society of Agricultural Engineers (ASAE), the American Society for Horticultural Science (ASHS), and the USDA North Central Regional Growth Chamber Use Committee (NCR-101). The most recent addition to this series has just been published in HortScience (10). The authors advocate adoption of their guidelines by researchers, reviewers, and editors on a worldwide basis. However, there is still both international and interdisciplinary disagreement on the terminology, and to a lesser extent, the units used for radiation measurements in the plant sciences. In many instances, these disagreements have been reduced to para-semantic arguments. On the other hand, there are many discrepancies in the literature which are due to inaccurate etymology, thereby leading to the potential danger that the grammatical roots of the nomenclature will be altered artificially. The purpose of this communication is to indicate these discrepancies before incorrect terminology becomes widely accepted.