“What’s in a name?” asked Shakespeare’s Juliet Capulet four centuries ago. Nothing, she decided: it is Romeo himself that matters, not his Montague name; after all, a rose will smell as sweet no matter what we call it. And yet, while Juliet may feel certain that Romeo’s true nature is worthy of her love regardless of his name, how do we know the essence of a new and abstract thought if we do not have a word for it? It’s a chicken-and-egg situation that begs a deeper question: what is the relationship between language and our perception of reality?
Scientists strive for the most objective possible interpretation of the physical world, but they have to create and communicate their ideas via language – and language, both verbal and mathematical, is itself a cultural creation. I’m happy enough to agree with Juliet that we probably all see a rose in the same way across language or culture, but the situation is different when it comes to more complex aspects of nature. For instance, “caring for Country”, a term created by Australia’s First Nations peoples, conveys a completely different idea of our relationship with the land we live on from a mainstream view in which the word
“land” has lost its history, and has become synonymous with disconnected single ideas such as “geography” or “agriculture”, or “property” or “jobs”. Names do have power, and language not only reflects culture, it has the power to define it.
This is a story about the struggle to find just the right names and symbols to express some strange new scientific and mathematical ideas – and about the controversial consequences of not having a name at all. A simple but dramatic scientific example of what I mean by finding the “right” name concerns the term “global warming”. It has given way to the broader “climate change”, because people were confused by unseasonal cold snaps: they didn’t understand the nature of rising long-term averages and extreme local fluctuations in our changing weather patterns, so “global warming” turned out to be a valid but counterproductive name for an overwhelming existential threat.
We wouldn’t be able to make
