EricS -
Great review of the "problem" with Metaphor-Forward communication.
Scientific language is a *lossy compression layer over a
high-dimensional formal plenum*, not a generative metaphor system.
I agree with the part of glen's (and others) criticism of Metaphors
(Spatulas) everywhere when their use as.compressed indexicality rather
than analogical exploration and facilitation. Your rant here also really
helps to illuminate that hip/cool usage is also faux/projected
"insider-signaling".
I understand the draw to using metaphors to try to communicate complex,
subtle, esoteric phenomena to folks without the background to follow all
but the most superficial features of the phenomena. Unfortunately this
is (IMO) a degenerate use of the potential power of
metaphorical/analogical/modeling language.
Many of us, when we embrace or dismiss metaphorical language, are
conflating this indexical-shorthand use with the generative and
exploratory use.
/What might we know anecdotally of the contexts where generative
metaphors are used in recognizing new models for observed phenomena? /
- SteveS
On 3/18/26 7:39 pm, Santafe wrote:
My worry is that scientists, when they use such rich metaphors as
entanglement fail to take responsibility for the consequences of such
use. Let's assume that the person who first used the metaphor,
entanglement, meant something by it. We can formalize the analysis
of metaphors just as we can mathematicize any proposition.
Wrong order, and not what happened. Fuller explanation below. I hope
I can report on what people are actually doing, as opposed to what the
psychologist who hasn’t asked them, or even in any serious way studied
them without asking them, supposes them to be doing.
And in that formalization, we can sort out the direction, and
misdirection in the metaphor. What did they intend when they used
the metaphor entanglement? What did they NOT intend? And when the
disclaimers have been completed, is there anything left of the
metaphor. If not, then, perhaps,*/scientists should stop using the
metaphor/*. In the same way that we have stopped calling porpoises
"fish".
The intent of the paragraph is okay (indeed, of course fine). But the
term that is missing is “moniker”. Metaphor here is missing the
point. The term is just a label. DaveW noted this as one of the
lifecycle stages in his list.
To the extent — referring back to Frank’s post — that it is
metaphorically anything, directing anybody’s thoughts anywhere, it
would be in Glen’s didactic subsense.
I don't know enough to even speculate what role "entanglement" as a
metaphor has played in the development of quantum physics.
None (afaik).
But I claim to know enough about human behavior to assert that it has
played some role, and that physicists run some risks if they
altogether disclaim it.
So: the antisymmetric character of many-electron states was worked out
from around 1926–1929, as I find it online. (I think that is likely
all right.) They just described the properties of the states. Good,
concrete, operational language. Slater determinants, and whatnot, if
one wants search terms.
Now, I learn from whatever AI serves answers to web searches (Gemini?)
that, like many things, apparently Schroedinger introduced
“entanglement” as an actual term in 1936, so say the kinds of things
Schroedinger would say (complaints about incompleteness that I still
don’t think have substance). The math was already in place and being
used. From anything I learned, Schroedinger’s having put a label on
it had no effect at all on anybody’s actually doing any quantum
mechanics. It also doesn’t seem to have been adopted, and I never
heard it used by anybody before the mid-1990s.
The fashion in the 1990s came from the quantum computing engineers.
They write lots of multi-electron wave functions down, with lots of
combinations, and they want a shorthand to refer to them. They also
_really_ like slang. Almost as much as the Japanese, for whom
“building” becomes just “biru” and “convenience store” becomes
“combini”. So, for the engineers, a unitary transformation becomes “A
unitary” (so cool to turn an adjective into a noun), and to refer
endlessly to entanglement. I don’t mean to scoff. They really are
very good at what they do, and they are all smarter than I am, and
understand their subject better than I do. I just can’t take the
coolness.
Anyway, that’s what the term is doing now. It’s a shorthand, and (not
entirely incidental, I think) communicating hipness.
Is it, didactically, directing people’s minds? Probably. Or maybe
only maybe. But the story that somebody started with a metaphor and
then formalized it sounds as backward as it is possible to get from
those ingredients. They started with a fog of confusion, stirred up a
mass of math that perplexed the hell out of people for several years,
learned to use it, gradually got better at it, and came up with a few
experiments to cash out that the math had unambiguous consequences
(Stern-Gerlach experiment), and over time built up a quite rigid
operational meaning.
Then some people came along in whose hands it became a commodity, and
having a short name to gesture at the structure (seen in whole, only
at the end, within the math) served a certain function. A
didactic-metaphoric name is of course nice for that, and Shroedinger
is often a good source of such things.
In different news, out of a sense that I needed to do due diligence
before getting myself into bluffing trouble, I actually went back and
read Kuhn’s Structure… a few weeks ago. Okay.
But there did seem to be something concrete worth commenting in reply.
TK suggests that in revolutionary times, people generate new ideas,
and then in the periods of “normal science” people spend their time on
“puzzle solving”, not really _inventing_ much of anything new.
There I think I often disagree (or at least with some cases). Usually
somebody gets some small fragment of something right-adjacent, often
in some formal form (say, Bohr’s atom: big mess, but a few little
things that nobody else can do, and that are specific), and a language
gradually gets drafted out, in which there are _lots_ of what I like
to call “placeholder terms”. While the revolution is running, many of
them can’t really be said to have anything as operational and concrete
as “meaning”, and they are often significantly aspirational in the
service they give.
What TK characterized as “puzzle solving” is often a period of
checking lots of cases and variations, to see what an edifice of
concrete work can be extended outward to cover, while retaining some
kind fo consistency. I would argue that that work is what actually
_builds_ the operational semantics of “meaning something”. Toward the
end, that semantics has finally raised the original term to better
than a placeholder — to a real moniker for the operational semantics
that it is used to refer to.
In the case of entanglement, the placeholders were really quite thin:
Pauli’s “two classically undescribable values” (the half-integer spin
values), “exclusion principle”, and similar. Then the semantics got
built up, and finally some didactic metaphors got attached to them,
somewhat ad hoc and not really standardized.
Anyway, all this is probably off the point that Nick and Glen are
addressing (contesting?). But if one is to adduce Fermionic QM as a
use case, probably good to stay sort of faithful to what the people
doing work are doing.
.- .-.. .-.. / ..-. --- --- - . .-. ... / .- .-. . / .-- .-. --- -. --. / ...
--- -- . / .- .-. . / ..- ... . ..-. ..- .-..
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Fridays 9a-12p Friday St. Johns Cafe / Thursdays 9a-12p Zoom
https://bit.ly/virtualfriam
to (un)subscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com
FRIAM-COMIC http://friam-comic.blogspot.com/
archives: 5/2017 thru present https://redfish.com/pipermail/friam_redfish.com/
1/2003 thru 6/2021 http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/
