(no subject)
Let us consider the idea that all forms of communication can be placed on a sliding scale between bare information at one end and emotional connotation at the other. So at one extreme end you would have algebra, which is a language designed to convey pure information without any emotional baggage. Statements like x=3y admit no ambiguity.
Then moving up the scale you'd get, say, legal language and then other forms of academic writing, passing into more general prose of an increasingly creative character, and eventually poetry, where connotations are at least as important as "meanings". Finally you would reach a language which is all emotional connotation and zero actual information: music, perhaps.
(Of course, there are numerous points of connection between maths and music so the two extremes probably latch together in some satisfying, cyclic way.)
What interests me is how you can move a statement from one part of this scale to another. Poets and novelists, for example, always bitterly resent any request to "rephrase" their ideas in more prosaic terms. Going in the other direction is problematic too. Like, I used to think that any mathematical or scientific idea could be translated into simple English, and perhaps before quantum theory that was true. But now it's probably not possible. Trying to explain, for example, what an electron is becomes a nightmare. It's not exactly a wave, it's not exactly a particle. It's something that's a bit like both of those things but for which we have no word and no real way of even imagining clearly. It's a sort of blur of probability.
This language is very allusive, which makes you think at first that you just haven't got a handle on it properly. But actually, the reality is very clear, and can be described with perfect accuracy by mathematical equations. It's just English which breaks down trying to circumscribe things which it has not evolved to cope with.
The relationship regular prose has with this kind of maths is inherently allusive, analogous to the relationship poetry has with prose. I think that was what Niels Bohr meant when he said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry" - the quote that made me want to write about this in the first place.
Then moving up the scale you'd get, say, legal language and then other forms of academic writing, passing into more general prose of an increasingly creative character, and eventually poetry, where connotations are at least as important as "meanings". Finally you would reach a language which is all emotional connotation and zero actual information: music, perhaps.
(Of course, there are numerous points of connection between maths and music so the two extremes probably latch together in some satisfying, cyclic way.)
What interests me is how you can move a statement from one part of this scale to another. Poets and novelists, for example, always bitterly resent any request to "rephrase" their ideas in more prosaic terms. Going in the other direction is problematic too. Like, I used to think that any mathematical or scientific idea could be translated into simple English, and perhaps before quantum theory that was true. But now it's probably not possible. Trying to explain, for example, what an electron is becomes a nightmare. It's not exactly a wave, it's not exactly a particle. It's something that's a bit like both of those things but for which we have no word and no real way of even imagining clearly. It's a sort of blur of probability.
This language is very allusive, which makes you think at first that you just haven't got a handle on it properly. But actually, the reality is very clear, and can be described with perfect accuracy by mathematical equations. It's just English which breaks down trying to circumscribe things which it has not evolved to cope with.
The relationship regular prose has with this kind of maths is inherently allusive, analogous to the relationship poetry has with prose. I think that was what Niels Bohr meant when he said, "When it comes to atoms, language can be used only as in poetry" - the quote that made me want to write about this in the first place.