i talked to prof. eberhard hilf yesterday. hilf is a retired professor of theoretical physics who is now working on the problems around long-term storage of electronic scientific data. we talked about the change in semantics as science moves forward, and the need to not only port content from old storage media to new ones, but also the need to transcribe the content itself to make it accessible to scientists of another age.
hilf demonstrated how equations as jotted down by einstein in 1905 would be almost incomprehensible to modern scientists today. over the years, verbose notations have been replaced by increasingly more succinct ones, new symbols have been introduced. i immediately had to think of leaky abstractions. hilf was adamant that physics was not prone to those problems because it is grounded in solid math.
good for them physicists, and too bad computer science cannot claim the same currently.

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