From: DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com Date: Fri, 29 Oct 1999 12:38:47 +0100
>> But are happy with ones which are based on very clear
>> misunderstandings of simple English words. "Up" as a property of
>> quarks is not the opposite of "down". Evocative or nay, that's a
>> wrong use.
>what on earth are you saying? (can't you read a map???)
Well, not without difficulty, but I don't see what that's got to do with the price of fish (£3.50/kilo last time I looked).
If I were the quibbly pettifogging sort, I might say that "up" is not -2/3 of a unit of "down", and we could have an argument about that. But I'm actually a hopelessy unrigorous freebooting stockbroker type, so I'll content myself with the following:
-- Don't you feel a little bit uncomfortable talking about "Strange-Charge space" when fellow spods are ragging on Lacan for talking about "irrational numbers". In fact this serves my point as well as yours -- I can't believe I didn't think of the example "A Hilbert space isn't a space" in the original post.
Unless you're reading it in bed, there isn't any "up" or "down" on a map of strange-charge space -- what there is is a purely social convention which takes the furthest edge of a piece of paper as "up", and calls people "wrong" if they hang things up on a wall in the opposite orientation.
For example, two of my mates have "inverted" maps of the world, placing the South at the top of the map (one of them bought it as a political statement about North/South trade, one is an Aussie). Of course, there's no real sense in which these maps are inverted (and what's so good about being at the top anyway), but the visual fun comes from subverting a common convention. Which convention seems to be so embedded in physics types (unsurprisingly -- a mathematician who tried to subvert conventions would be in trouble pretty soon) that "up" and "down" appear as physical facts.
If the (semi-intentional) misuse of scientific terms by postmodernists calls attention to these conventions -- and indeed raises the question of who was it that died and gave Hilbert the right to decide what a space was -- then it strikes me that Lacan and his gang might be onto something less crackpot than you think --- and less deathly dull than I think. I'm still not buying any books though.
cheers
dd