From: DANIEL.DAVIES at flemings.com
> -- 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".
While I have real difficulty assuming this post is in good faith and not mere spam, I'll try to take it seriously. As I kept telling my students over several decades, there are many many more things, or even categories of things, in the world than there are or can be words in the English language. Hence when we find a given word used in a number of senses or some special sense, before we leap to the conclusion that we have either a case of profound/confused metaphor or of mere bad usage we should at least consider the demands placed on diction by this simple numerical fact.
There are two features that distinguish the terminology of nuclear particles from the instance cited from Lacan. (1) The physicists are obviously men with some literary taste and a sense of humor, while it seems fairly obvious that Lacan is neither. (2) There is no possibility of the terminology misleading either the physicists themselves *or* non-physicists trying to gain some minimal understanding of the field. There is a reasonable basis for assuming that Lacan's terminology may lead to (or is even intended to lead to) real confusion. It seems deliberately obscurantist, as does this post from Davies.
Incidentally, the web site posted for particle theory is wonderful.
Carrol