Pragmatic Perspectives on Language and Linguistics

Volume II:

Pragmatics of Semantically-Restricted Domains

Edited by

Iwona Witczak-Plisiecka

CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

METAPHORS, PARTICLES, TERMINOLOGY: FROM OBJECTIVIST TO COGNITIVIST

APPROACH IN PHYSICS AND LINGUISTICS

HANNA PUACZEWSKA, ACADEMY OF INTERNATIONAL STUDIES, LODZ & UNIVERSITY OF REGENSBURG

1. Introduction It is a truism to say that science cannot develop without a language to

speak about its insights. Obviously, the potential of a language for generating new lexical items is of vital importance for the growth of scientific language, which constitutes the means of communication essential for growth in the sciences.

One of the means of creating new vocabulary, in exact sciences as well as in other domains of human reflection, is the metaphor. In what follows a look is offered at the lexical pragmatics of the language of particle physics, which is an arena of abundant deployment of metaphor as a means of enriching terminology. The role of metaphor in providing vocabulary for particle physics is presented alongside with the comment on the relationship between the approach to metaphor as a source of new lexis on the one hand, and the self-understanding of physics in its diachronic development on the other. The radical changes in this self-understanding which have taken place within the last hundred years correspond to the development of the philosophical views on language itself, brought forward in particular by the emergence of cognitive linguistics in the late 20th century. The direction of change has been the same in linguistics, philosophy of science and the practising scientists! reflection on their field of studies: from the objectivist attitude which attributes both to language and a physical model the role of being a

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reflection of the reality, made up of categories and concepts corresponding to independently existing features of this reality, to the cognitivist-pragmatic view of both language and scientific exegesis as a part of human perception and cognition. Viewed from the latter perspective, they both appear as shaped essentially by the functional requirements of interpersonal intelligibility and secondarily by the users epistemological attitudes.1

2. Early modern period: metaphor under attack

In the period when modern science began, the linguistic problem was seen as very important in the consideration of the scientific method. The approach to language of those involved in the pursuit of the natural phenomena was characterised by a sense of inadequacies and dangers inherent in all ancient and modern languages; !redundancy, anomaly, ambiguity and equivocation" (Dalgarno 1834 [1661]).

Many of the leading figures in the scientific revolution, such as Bacon,

Hobbes, and Boyle, urged the necessity for a reform of language to make

it fit for science, and the Royal Society actually formed a committee for

improving the English tongue, !particularly for philosophical [i.e.

scientific] purposes" (Sprat 1959 [1657]: 111); the societys members

were urged to strive for the ideal of !bringing all things as near the

Mathematical plainness as they can" (ibid.: 113). Jones (1932) claims that

the distrust of language at that time was carried to such extremes that !all

verbal media of communication were considered one of the greatest

obstacles to the advancement of learning" (Jones 1932: 319). Linguistic

defects discovered in natural languages were multiple, they included the

irregularity of the grammatical rules, ambiguity of words and the existence

of synonyms. Metaphor, conveying the connotations from the ordinary use

in a word employed in a scientific treaty, was quite prominent among the

obstacles to !plain speech".

From the Aristotelian view of metaphor as the transference of a name

from its proper object to some other object, it was natural to fear that a

transfer of meaning essential for a metaphor was likely to deceive those

who had taken the word or name in question as signifying only the original

object. If a word was to be a match for a thing or action, metaphor was

1 Cf. e.g. Lakoff and Johnson 1980 for linguistics, Hesse 1953/54, 1966, 1971,

1988 for philosophy of science, Born 1953/54 for meta-theoretical reflection by a

practicing physicist.

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379

undesirable and should be banned from scientific language. John Wilkins

stated in 1668:

As for the ambiguity of words by reason of Metaphor and Phraseology,

this is in all instituted languages so obvious and various, that it is needless

to give any instances of it; every Language having some peculiar phrases

belonging to it, which, if they were translated verbatim into another

Tongue, would seem wild and insignificant [...] And although the varieties

of Phrases in Language may contribute to elegance and ornament of

speech; yet, like other things of fashion, they are very changeable, every

generation producing new ones.

(Wilkins, John: An Essay Towards a Real Character and Philosophical

Language, 1954: 17-18)

Similarly, Berkeley (1721) demanded that !philosophers should

abstain from metaphor" (Berkeley, !De Motu" 1969: 203), and Locke

(1706) addressed the question of !the proper use of words" saying that

The use, then, of words is to be sensible marks of ideas, and the ideas they

stand for are their proper and immediate signification [...] It is true,

common use by tacit consent appropriates certain sounds to certain ideas in

all languages, which so far limits the signification of that sound, that unless

a man applies it to the same idea, he does not speak properly.

(Locke, John: An essay concerning human understanding, Book III,

Chap. 2, Section 8. 1963, vol. 2: 165)

Locke criticised !Inconsistency" in using words as !a great abuse of

Words", and !Obscurity" created by !applying old Words to new and

unusual Significations" (Ibid., Book III, Chap. X, Section 6. Vol. 2: 492).

He continued:

Words being invented for signs of my Ideas, to make them known to others

not by any natural signification but a voluntary imposition, #tis plain cheat

and abuse when I make them stand sometimes for one thing and sometimes

for another; the wilful doing whereof can be imputed to nothing but great

Folly, or greater dishonesty. (Ibid.: 492-493)

In accordance with these principles, new coinages enriching scientific

terminology took their form from the morphological and semantic

resources of the classical languages, by combining Greek or Latin roots

and affixes. This translation method ensured that the new items would not

be unduly familiar and blocked the importation of connotations from past

usage, which suited the denotative intention of a scientist aiming to

produce a non-ambiguous, one-to-one correspondence between a denotation

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and the object to be named. This method of creating scientific vocabulary

flourished still in the 19th century; a search for new coinages in Oxford

English Dictionary demonstrates that at that time, both the roots and the

affixes of the aforementioned type were highly productive.

3. 20th century and beyond: the change of attitude

In the 1960s, assimilated by Kuhn in his influential theory of scientific

revolution, the socialised concept of the !scientific truth! began to replace

the former mainstream view of natural sciences as a continuous progress

towards the objective and knowable truth. Currently the essential

difference in the cognitive status of science and other kinds of discourse is

being questioned as much as the notion of an independent fact: facts are

theory-laden, and whenever something happens, as many facts are created

as there are ways to conceptualise, as many as there are languages to

describe the corresponding transaction. Perception and cognition are not

separable from each other; the pre-existing knowledge of the perceiving

subject structures the contents of perception. It is pointless to speak of the

level of !immediately given" or to ask for the level of description defining

!what we really are talking about".

One of the consequences of this view is the trend against the objectivist

mistrust of metaphor, in which metaphor and other kinds of fanciful

language can and should be avoided in speaking about facts, as they do not

fit reality, and thus cannot contribute to the objective knowledge. Exact

sciences take their roots in everyday experience, and the natural source of

the concepts they employ are the non-technical notions of everyday

experience. Scientific concepts tend to be formed as far as possible in

analogy to the concepts of ordinary experience in a process in which the

unknown and strange is conceptualised and described in terms of the more

familiar; the notion of a metaphor-free scientific thought and language is

not attainable. This recognition is reflected among other things in the

development of terminology in the field of particle physics.

In the 20th century and today, the traditional method of producing new

terms by combining Greek and Latinate morphemes, although still used,

has been accompanied by a number of other strategies. Among them, the

metaphoric transfer of denotations has been especially frequent in those

fields where new terms are produced with high frequency. The change in

opinion concerning what is regarded as appropriate in terminology has

been commented upon by Raad (1989: 129):

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381

Until recently, in order to describe an empirical world which appeared

stable and permanent, the scientists adopted communicative devices (that

is, terminology and norms of usage) which aimed to create a distance from

emotive and suggestive variances in meaning. In other words, scientists

attempted to remove their language from familiar associations [...] Such a

position is obviously not tenable in the world of science today.

Nomenclature must remain controlled by the requirements of both

uniformity and expressiveness, neither of which can in effect be subverted

[...] Recent changes in attitudes and in the nature of science and of

language have created an environment where a shift is occurring in the

perception of what is appropriate to meet the demands of expressiveness

and intelligibility. While the earlier phases of science may have

discouraged experimentation in nomenclature [...] perhaps the international

prestige of English today and the general liberalisation of attitudes have

encouraged a new boldness in usage. Scientists are now more willing than

before to go public, and the new words of science are more likely to

operate within linguistic framework of our ordinary speech, even to the

extent of exhibiting emotive associations.

This new, liberal attitude to language marks the changed meta-

theoretical predilections of physicists.

The event decisive for the playful way of dealing with nomenclature in

particle physics took place in 1964, when Murray Gell-Mann of the

California Institute of Technology introduced the name quark to denote a

theoretical entity in his model of elementary particles. The fantasy-name

!quark" originates in Joyce#s Finnegans Wake and has no meaning in common language. As an act of coining a new scientific term, it was a rather revolutionary event because the linguistic label was assigned to the object to be named in a whimsical, arbitrary mode. It should be noted that at the moment of the introduction of the quark model, quarks were not universally regarded as entities which could possibly be observed one day in a laboratory, but rather as theoretical constructs postulated to account for a set of experimental results:

It is fun to speculate about the way quarks would behave if they were physical particles of finite mass (instead of purely mathematical entities as they would be in the limit of infinite mass). [...] One of the quarks would be absolutely stable [...] A search for stable quarks [...] at the highest energy accelarators would help to reassure us of the non-existence of real quarks. (Gell-Mann 1964: 215) Although !quark" has sometimes been referred to in a popular manner

as !the" verbal metaphor in quantum physics (cf. e.g. Martin 1999), in fact

it is no metaphor at all; it is a pure neologism, as prior to its adoption in

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the terminology of physics it had no meaning in any variety of English. Its

importance for the metaphorical use of language in particle physics lies in

its precedence-setting role. Murray Gell-Mann commented upon this

coinage:

In 1963, when I assigned the name quark to the fundamental constituents of the nucleon, I had the sound first, without the spelling, which could have been kwork. Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word quark in the phrase Three quarks for Muster Mark. Since quark (meaning, for one thing, the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with Mark, as well as bark and other such words, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as kwork. But the book represents the dreams of a publican named Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker. Words in the text are typically drawn from several sources at once, like the portmanteau words in Through the Looking Glass. From time to time, phrases occur in the book that are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry Three quarks for Muster Mark might be Three quarts for Mister Mark, in which case the pronunciation kwork would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature. (Gell-Mann 1995: 180) The introduction of quark was subsequently followed by the

introduction of numerous whimsical and humorist items with which particle physicists named their theoretical objects. This process reflects a growing consciousness of the creative character of physical science, closely related to the fact that physical models are more and more distant from the world of direct experience. In Klasson!s formulation, today!s scientists realise that they are up against something strange and unfamiliar; they are like science fiction writers trying to convey something utopian, unreal, to their readers (Klasson 1977: 28).

By that time one of the quantum numbers characterising elementary particles had been known for a decade as strangeness, and the particles characterised by a non-zero value of this number as strange particles. The motivation for this naming was the strangely long lifetimes of certain elementary particles for which the new quantum number provided a satisfactory account. Denoting a theoretical parameter by the name of a subjective impression it made on the researcher and the unquestioned acceptance it found among persons involved in the research was already a mark of the new, liberal approach to language. After Gell-Mann, in 1962, managed to gain acceptance for another denotation violating the traditional rules of scientific coinage, gluons, particles holding together the constituents of atomic nuclei (Gell-Mann 1962: 1067), the path was

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prepared for even bolder linguistic events such as fantasy-names and

fantasy-metaphors. Quark quickly won popularity2 (gaining the upper

hand over the rival label ace proposed by G. Zweig3), and later in the same

year, the term charm was introduced by Bjrken and Glashow (1964: 255)

for their postulated additional quantum number of certain elementary

particles.

The next significant event in the vocabulary of particle physics came

when Gell-Mann (1972: 736) introduced the term color to denote a

proposed additional attribute (quantum number) of quarks. This attribute

differentiated quarks into three types, which were assigned arbitrary names

of three visual colours. By introducing this arbitrary property the concept

of quark could be saved without violating Wolfgang Pauli!s dictum that no two identical elementary particles can occupy the same place at the same time. The introduction of colors made quarks differ from each other and secured the preservation of Pauli!s principle.

Colors of quarks are unobservable: particles observable in laboratory experiments are supposed to be assemblies of quarks whose colors neutralise each other. The concept is saved by the additional assumption that only colorless particles are stable in nature.4

In Gell-Mann!s original proposal, the colors of quarks were blue, red, white, and their anti-colors anti-blue, anti-red, anti-white. These two triads of colors seem to still have been current in 1975.5 At the end of the 20th century, the set of colors consisted more frequently of blue, yellow, andred complemented by anti-red, anti-blue, and anti-yellow. (Occasionally, green was used instead of yellow; cf., for example, Nambu 1981: 116.) In scientific papers different colors are designated simply by letters which are not necessarily abbreviations of the linguistic labels,6 so that the latter usually appear only in introductory presentations of the concept of color. The colorless combinations of quarks are triads of yellow-blue-red and pairs which consist of a quark of a given color and an anti-quark of a

2 Used later in the same year by different authors, e.g. Greenberg 1964; Bg, Lee and Pais 1964. 3 Zweig, in CERN Reports 8182/TH.401 and 8419/TH.412, 1964. Both alternative names, quarks and aces, have been proposed in the article by Feynman, Gell-Mann and Zweig, 1964: 678. 4 Whether this presumption has to be retained is presently a subject of further research. 5 They appear e.g. in Physical Review Letters 34, No. 7, February 1975: 431, and No. 15, April 1975: 985. 6 E.g. Physics Letters 60 B, No. 2, 1976: 178 where colored quarks are designated P, N, L.

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complementary color. The later replacement of yellow for white in the set

of colours labelling the three kinds of quarks was motivated by the fact

that in time the colorless state had also come to be referred to as white,7 as

well as by a desire for more systematicity: after this change the names of

the colors of quarks corresponded to the names of the so-called primary

additive colours.

The force which keeps the quarks together which make up a particle

(through the exchange of other elementary particles called gluons) came to

be called color force. The abstract mathematical space in which quarks

may be !rotated" and thus made to change their colors, a !receptacle" of

the colors of quarks, was given the name color space. We also speak today

of color flux (e.g. Aguiar et al. 1998) and color current (e.g. Ochs and

Perez Ramez 2008).

The common language semantics of the concept of colour provides the

guideline for the linguistic expression of further associated concepts,

hence color transparency and color opacity (e.g. Nikolaev 1994), opacity

and transparency being concepts from the field of optical and visual

phenomena. In the example of this extension we see how the introduction

of one metaphorical term may be followed by the development of a

network of terms whose labels are taken from the same donor field. This

way stipulative catachresis including an arbitrary fantasy-metaphor may

perform a linguistically similar function as an analogy-based physical

model, the function to which Martin and Harr (1982) referred as

!spinning off a matrix of terminology".

A linguistically interesting achievement of particle physics was the

introduction, by analogy with the earlier theory known as quantum

electrodynamics, of the term quantum chromodynamics,8 to denote the

branch of physics dealing with colors of quarks and the color force. It

applies the traditional method of coining new terms by drawing upon a set

of ancient morphemes, but one of these morphemes (chrom- from chroma,

Gr. !color") is a product of the translation into Greek of a highly

whimsical modern metaphor. Another option for combining the traditional

method with the existing metaphorical labels is by affixing a vernacular

morpheme with a classical affix. In 1975, the terms charmonium,

orthocharmonium and paracharmonium were introduced by Appelquist

and Politzer (1975: 45) to name particles consisting of a charmed quark-

antiquark pair. Other new coinages of the same type followed:

7 E.g. Nambu 1981: 117: !All hadrons are in #colorless$ or #white$ state." 8 Attributed to Gell-Mann. The primary written source could not be identified; the

term originated possibly in oral communication.

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Some more applications of QED wave also made to decays of heavy

quarkonia such as J/y!s (charmonium) and g"s (bottomium) and to nonleptonic decays of hadrons. (Muta 1987: 4) Insofar as these terms may be conceived of as a reflection of the self-

understanding of physics, we can see them as an encounter in one word of the pretence of science for authority and seriousness and the playful attitude which is conscious of its constructive, creative character.

The transfer of denotation from the visual quality (colour) to the hypothetical theoretical property of quarks is usually regarded as a pure fantasy-metaphor: catachresis in which a name is transferred to a new sort of referent on arbitrary choice, but there are some grounds which make it possible to group it with the more usual sort of catachresis motivated by a certain amount of similarity or analogy between the donor and recipient subject. The analogy between the properties of quarks and the colours of concrete objects is weak and an after-thought, but not altogether non-existent, and it has been sometimes indicated as the motivation for the transfer. According to Johnson (1979: 103),

The word color is used because the way different colored quarks combine is reminiscent of the way visual colors combine. If we assume that the transfer of denotation was actually based on an

analogy rather than fully whimsical, its consistency may be described as follows: coming in combinations, particular colors of quarks (or, more precisely, colored quarks) are not observable, just as in a mixture of visual colours the component colours are not observable. Quarks of a given color combine into colorless assemblies with antiquarks of the complementary anticolor, just as the so-called complementary (visual) colours additively mixed provide mixtures which are perceived as colourless. The analogy is weak because the combinations of primary additive colours (red, blue, and yellow) do not produce a #white$, or colourless, mixture: the basic character of primary additive colours lies in the fact that all other colours can be produced by their combination. Moreover, as previously indicated, at the time of the introduction of the term color, the proposed namings of the particular colors did not correspond to the primary additive colours; a rather casual set was proposed at first, to be systematised later by the replacement of white by yellow.

MacCormac (1985: 223) states that using colors as labels for properties of quarks contributes to the researcher"s tendency to think of quarks as definite objects. It remains

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difficult to conceive of things as colored (even if color is attributed to them

on an analogical basis) without also conceiving of them as finite, definite,

and available.

While agreeing with his point that naming a hypothetical property of

quarks color enhances to a certain degree the imagistic aspect of their mental representation, denoting abstract attributes by largely arbitrarily assigned names of sensorial attributes also has a contrary aspect. The obviously fanciful character of this naming also expresses the reservation on the part of the researcher that the theoretical description is not to be taken at face value, as a literal one. Just as color is not to be interpreted as what it usually means, i.e. a sensory quality of definite, finite, available entities, so its carriersquarksare not to be interpreted as such entities. To some extent, the statement that quarks are colored through a literal falsity of the predication points to the as-if character of quarks as the presupposed subject of the predication. The following text supports this view; it is a fragment of the first publication in which the term color was used by Gell-Mann, the author of both coinages.

We take three different kinds of quarks, that is nine altogether, and call the new variable distinguishing the sets color, for example red, white and blue (R-W-B) [...] We require that all physical baryon and meson states be singlets under the SU3 of color [...] This restriction to color singlet states for real physical situations gives back exactly the sort of statistics we want. Now if this restriction is applied to all real baryons and mesons, then the quarks presumably cannot be real particles. Nowhere have I said up to now that quarks have to be real particles. There might be real quarks, but nowhere in the theoretical ideas that we are going to discuss is there any insistence that they be real. The whole idea is that hadrons act as if they are made up of quarks, but the quarks do not have to be real

(Gell-Mann 1972: 736-737). Around 1975, another sensory quality lent its label to the nomenclature

of particle physics: flavour.9 In order to account for conservation of the 9 The source publication could not be identified, but flavor is missing from publications before 1975 and frequently used in 1976. The invention of the term flavor is usually attributed to Y. Nambu, but he himself comments: Frankly I do not know why and when people started to attribute the term flavor to me [...] Once (or more than once) I heard that Gell-Mann had attributed the term color to me. He himself may have said so to me. But that is definitely not accurate. I started the concept, not the name [...] Maybe the case of flavor is similar. In the seventies when QCD and color became popular, I heard that Glashow was using the term flavor, though I did not know for what exactly. Then I also talked to

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quantum numbers in hadronic reactions one assumes the existence of

different kinds of quarks corresponding to these conserved quantum

numbers; flavor is the generic term for the set of quantum numbers, that is,

of the types of quarks. Just as the colors of quarks can be changed by

rotating them in color space, so a quark of one flavor may be turned into a

quark of another flavor by rotation in a flavor space (e.g. Kirchbach 1999)

conceived as a receptacle of flavor of quarks. Two opposite flavors (e.g. of

a particle and its antiparticle) cancel out each other and a particle

consisting of quarks of opposite flavors is said to be flavorless.

The introduction of strangeness and charm as terms referring to

quantum numbers and quarks was followed by the proposal by Achiman,

Koller and Walsh (1975: 261) of another type of quark which they called

fancy, but the concept, and the associated term, has not gained ground.

Also in the same year, another group proposed a new quantum number,

gentleness10 (quarks displaying this property were called gentle), but this

concept, too, has not found enough support and the new term has failed to

enter the lexicon. The same thing happened to the independently proposed

term justice (cf. Gregory 1988).

The arbitrary spatial terms up and down, distinguishing between two

possible values of the quantum number called isotopic spin, were

introduced by Gell-Mann (1964: 219)11 along with strange as names for

three kinds of quark. (!Strange" quark is the one responsible for the earlier

mentioned !strangeness" of !strange particles".) Top and bottom were

added to the flavor family by Harari (1975: 265) who proposed a group of

top, bottom, and right quarks besides the existing group of up, down, and

strange ones. The three terms came from the visual representation of their

configuration in an abstract two-dimensional space. Top and bottom

referred again to the values of isotopic spin, represented by the vertical

axis in the representation, higher for the top quark and lower for the

bottom quark. The term !right" has not survived.12

someone over the telephone about the name flavor in the context used now. I

thought I was quoting him. But I may have been misinterpreting what I had heard."

In a letter to the author from 18. July 1996. 10 ScAm, May 1975: 43; the original source could not be identified. 11 Gell-Mann used the abbreviations u, d, and s for !strange". 12 Today, the standard model in particle physics is based on the assumption that

ordinary matter is composed of two kinds of particles, quarks and leptons, and that

the forces between them are transmitted by a third category of particles called

bosons. Quarks come in three families, each of them consisting of two particles:

the first family consists of the up and the down quark; the second consists of the

strange quark embodying the flavor called strangeness and the charmed quark

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The customary abbreviation of top and bottom quarks with their initial

letters, resulting in talking of e.g. bb quark system and b-flavored mesons,13 gave rise to another fanciful linguistic innovation: the bottom quantum number embodied by the bottom quark and the quantum number embodied by the hypothetical top quark are occasionally renamed as beauty and truth. Beauty was at first a hidden property of quarks making up some observed products of subatomic collisions. In the early 1980s, Mistry, Poling and Thorndike announced that they had succeeded in creating particles in which this flavor was no longer hidden; they declared it to be naked and proclaimed (ScAm 1983: 104) that their newly-created particles displayed naked beauty (or bare bottom).

It is to be noted that beauty and truth belong to the type called luxury metaphors (or luxury terms) because the alternative, syntactically equivalent terms top and bottom existed already prior to their introduction and the new terms were redundant for all but decorative purposes. They are mainly applied in popular scientific texts and were probably introduced in this context. For example, the composed particles exhibiting the flavor of beauty (such as mesons made of two quarks, one of which is endowed with beauty) are called b-flavored in scientific texts and beauty-flavored in corresponding popular texts.14

4. Comments and conclusions

In the 17th century, philosophers set a cornerstone of modern physical science in introducing a distinction between secondary and primary qualities. The ultimate theoretical description of the physical world, and of the secondary qualities themselves as the products of the action of external reality upon human senses, was to be given in terms of primary qualities. Qualities other than the primary (i.e. other than number, figure, magnitude, position, and motion), although often prominent to the senses, came to be regarded as secondary, subordinate effects of the primary. For Galileo, as well as for Descartes, they were also the effect of the senses themselves. They were regarded as confusing and untrustworthy elements in the sense-picture of nature, with the effect that

embodying the flavor called charm; the third family of the bottom quark and the (predicted but so far not experimentally supported) top quark, embodying respectively flavors of the same names, termed alternatively beauty and truth. 13 Physical Review Letters 45, 1980: 221. 14 E.g. Physical Review Letters 45, 1980: 221 versus ScAm, July 1983: 99.

Metaphors, Particles, Terminology

389

till the time of Galileo it has always been taken for granted that man and

nature were both integral parts of the larger whole, in which mans place

was the more fundamental. Whatever distinctions might be made between

being and non-being, between primary and secondary, man was regarded

as fundamentally allied with the positive and the primary [...] Now, in the

course of translating this distinction of primary and secondary into terms

suited to the new mathematical interpretation of nature, we have the first

stage of reading of man quite out of the real and primary realm.

(Burtt 1924, 1967: 78-79)

The meta-theoretical predilections associated with this programme

have been abandoned in the meantime, and the change in the self-

understanding of physical science finds expression in a playful return to

secondary qualities as a source of idiom. Color, flavor, and the spatial

terms up and down, bottom and top, naming originally directly observable

attributes, have become successful as items of terminology. In the search

for new labels, the physicists have turned not only to the domain of

sensory attributes (secondary qualities) but also to the sphere of human

judgements and emotions, with names such as charm, gentleness, justice,

beauty, or truth, pertaining originally to human aesthetic and moral

judgements.

This relates to the fact that the fantasy terms in physical terminology

gradually acquired one more function, that of representing physics for the

layman in an attractive, attention-catching and stimulating wrapping. The

fancy-labels share this function with such shorthand-labels of physical

processes as Maxwells demon, heat death or arrow of time; all these have

become well-entrenched exegetical elements in renderings of physical

theories, performing educational and imagistic functions. As it became

clear that the language of physics could not be purified from the

metaphorical component because we are condemned to use, in a physical

description, a language which has grown in communication about ordinary

experience, however little convergent with the insights of modern science,

physicists have turned the vice into a virtue and engaged in a playful

enterprise of linguistic inventiveness.

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