Economist Style Guide - Redress Information & Analysis

Gresham’s law When money of a high intrinsic value is in circulation
with money of lesser value, it is the inferior currency which tends to
remain in circulation, while the other is either hoarded or exported. In
other words: “Bad money drives out good”.
Grimm’s law Concerns mutations of the consonants in the various
Germanic languages. Proto-Indo-European voiced aspirated stops,
voiced unaspirated stops and voiceless stops become respectively
voiced unaspirated stops, voiceless stops and voiceless fricatives.
Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle Energy and time or position and
momentum cannot both be accurately measured simultaneously. The
product of their uncertainties is h (Planck’s constant).
Hooke’s law The stress imposed on a solid is directly proportional to
the strain produced within the elastic limit.
Laws of thermodynamics
1 The change in the internal energy of a system equals the sum of
the heat added to the system and the work done on it.
2 Heat cannot be transferred from a colder to a hotter body within
a system without net changes occurring in other bodies in the
system.
3 It is impossible to reduce the temperature of a system to absolute
zero in a fi nite number of steps.
Mendel’s Principles The Law of Segregation is that every somatic cell
of an individual carries a pair of hereditary units for each character:
the pairs separate during meiosis so that each gamete carries one unit
only of each pair.
The Law of Independent Assortment is that the separation of units
of each pair is not infl uenced by that of any other pair.
Murphy’s law Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Also
known as sod’s law.
Ohm’s law Electric current is directly proportional to electromotive
force and inversely proportional to resistance.
laws
Parkinson’s law First published in The Economist, November 19th
1955. The author, C. Northcote Parkinson, sought to expand on the
“commonplace observation that work expands so as to fi ll the time
available for its completion”. After studying Admiralty staffi ng levels,
he concluded that in any public administrative department not actually
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