Ideograms for Physics and Chemistry

TL;DR

This paper advocates for the increased use of ideograms in Physics and Chemistry to improve communication, proposing new symbols designed for intuitiveness and ease of understanding, supported by a LaTeX package.

Contribution

It introduces a set of novel, intuitive ideograms for key Physics and Chemistry concepts and provides a LaTeX package for their adoption.

Findings

Proposed a standardized set of ideograms for Physics and Chemistry

Developed a LaTeX package (svrsymbols) for easy integration

Demonstrated potential for simplifying complex equations

Abstract

Ideograms (symbols that represent a word or idea) have great communicative value. They refer to concepts in a simple manner, easing the understanding of related ideas. Moreover, ideograms can simplify the often cumbersome notation used in the fields of Physics and physical Chemistry. Nonetheless only a few specific ideograms for these fields have been defined to date. In this work we propose that the scientific community follows the example of Mathematics -as well as that of oriental languages- and bestows a more important role upon ideograms. To support this thesis we propose ideograms for essential concepts in Physics and Chemistry. They are designed to be intuitive, and their goal is to make equations easier to read and understand. Our symbols are included in a publicly available Latex package (svrsymbols).