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I've been reading papers from nucleate boiling mechanics and related areas, and I keep being puzzled by the usage of apostrophes. For example, we talk about bubbles:

Numerical simulations of the bubble dynamics in viscoelastic media showed varying degrees of success in accurately predicting the observations.

Here we see bubble dynamics with no apostrophe. Then on the next page:

Visualization of the multiflash imaging technique with timing diagrams of the variable flash sequences used during each phase of the bubble’s evolution with example images.

Here we have bubble's evolution, apsotrophe present. Or, another example:

The assumption of material homogeneity in the model is likely also not valid for agarose gels, particularly in the early parts of a bubble’s lifetime.

So is it equally correct to say the bubble's size and the bubble size, the heater's tempetature and the heater temperature, etc.?

Please help me sort it out. Many thanks to all who had enough patience to read all this.

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You're seeing a mix of noun adjuncts, where the word "bubble" is used to modify another word, and possessives, where is said to belong to a bubble.

Bubble dynamics is a discipline within fluid mechanics. To name the field, we need to have a general, described term like this. "A bubble's dynamics" would be talking about the motion of a particular bubble (and would not match with the actual way we use the term 'dynamics' within engineering science). You will seldom see possessives used to describe a topic, abstractly.

The possessive is used in "each phase of the bubble's evolution" to refer to the phases belonging to a particular bubble. Thus, the bubble in question has an evolution. Though sometimes this could refer to a characteristic bubble rather than a concrete example of a bubble, the possessive would not be used to name the topic examining bubbles evolving: that topic would be bubble evolution.

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  • Thank you very much for such a detailed answer! That makes things a lot clearer to me now. But then again, all over the papers that I read I can see "the heater size", "the heater surface temperature" or "the superheated layer thickness etc., and it's very rarely that I come across "the heater's something" (with apostrophe). I'd be much obliged to get some comments on that. Thanks!!!
    – Elena
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 5:56
  • I keep thinking about this, and maybe the answer is: if the object cannot be used in something abstract like "bubble evolution as in examining bubbles evolving", then it's ok not to use the apostrophe? There is no discipline or abstract topic that can be titled "the heater temperature", or the "layer thickness", as a matter of fact.
    – Elena
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 6:05
  • When I noted the things that the possessive form could not do, I was not establishing a boundary for what noun adjunct phrases can do. "Bubble dynamics" is valid by not "bubble's dynamic", while "bubble size" and "bubble's size" are both coherent thoughts, and both probably occur in the literature to describe the size of bubbles.
    – Mike Graham
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 6:44
  • There is some subtle differences I can perceive, but not describe well, that might distinguish between noun adjunct phrases and the possessive form when both are coherent. Maybe it will help to say that when we use noun adjuncts, we are making nouns into modifiers, like adjectives. Where "a bubble's size" means "the size of a bubble" and "the bubble's size" means "the size of the bubble", "bubble size" means " a( bubble ) size", where a: { nouns } → { adjectives } . Can you grok the difference between a train station and a train's station?
    – Mike Graham
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 6:49
  • Something to think about. Thank you!
    – Elena
    Commented Dec 27, 2019 at 7:08
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The general idea is that you don't use possessives when referring to an entity already defined. In a linguistic sense, these can be thought of as phrasal proper nouns.

A made-up example:

Let $T_H$ be the heater temperature.

We know that the heater temperature is greater than ambient.

Therefore, the heater temperature is guaranteed to be greater than any heater's temperature that is cooler than ambient. (The temperature of the heater in question is guaranteed to be lower than the temperature of any other heater, if that other heater is cooler than the ambient temperature).

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