metaphors in the languages of science · 2006. 10. 10. · origins and uses of metaphors. consider,...

KHURSHID AHMAD

Metaphors in the Languages of Science1?

(Appeared in New Trends in Specialized Discourse Analysis. (2006) Eds. Maurizio Gotti &Vijay

Bhatia. Bern:Peter Lang, pp 197-220)

1. Introduction

Scholars in LSP studies have the gift of prescience – the discussions

about the conceptual organization of the terminology of a domain,

started nearly a century ago by Eugene Wüster, have a clear resonance

with the discussions related to ontology in the current literature in distributed computing, especially in the literature on semantic web.

The ever burgeoning web, with texts, images, music and movies, is

searched predominantly using ‘keywords’; search engines have large collections of these words used to index texts (and images) such that a

user can retrieve the indexed texts using the self-same or similar

keywords. The literature on search engine technology has contributions on ontology – literally what there is, a notion that is not

alien to the Wüster tradition: any attempts at the organization of

concepts requires thought about what there is or is perceived to be.

The work in ontology is about creating the conceptual

organization for building term collections and about validating terms

of a specialist domain. LSP researchers have moved on and are now focusing on how texts are organized by the use of terms and

examining the social context of specialist writing. This chapter is

about this move and here I would like to examine the use of metaphor in scientific writing. Linguistic metaphors are used extensively in

science in particular and specialist writing in general. There are two

strands in this chapter: first, a review of work in metaphor studies that

1 This paper is based on three presentations: first, an invited key note speech at

the 11th European Symposium on LSP (Ahmad 1997); second, a selected

presentation at the European Science Foundation Workshop on Metaphors

(Granada 2004); and third a contribution to the 15th European Symposium on

LSP (Bergamo 2005).

Khurshid Ahmad 2

focus on the transference between domains through the use of

metaphors, in conjunction with mathematical symbolism and images.

The source domain, to use a term in cognitive linguistics, may be

everyday language or it can be a specialism, and the target domain usually is (another) specialist domain. Second, I will describe how

corpus linguistics methods and techniques can be used in the study of

metaphor in science and technology. My purpose is to draw attention to the edifice of science: there

is no denying that science has improved the quality of life through its

application of principles and practices. There is equally not much

evidence to deny the critics of science that science, or its uses, has de-

humanized human society at large and has created seemingly

unsolvable problems for generations of humans to come. The utility

and horror notwithstanding, scientists show us how language can be used to build a constellation of theories and experimentations, mostly

to satisfy curiosity amongst some human beings. The curiosity then

sometimes leads on to transistor chips, which when incorporated in my computer helped me write this paper; the computer was powered

by energy generated through hydro-electric power or nuclear fuels.

Scientists literally and metaphorically (!) create a world of make-believe through a web of words – some borrowed, some

invented, endorsing self-belief here and suppressing the beliefs of

others there. Consider the tension involved in the use of metaphors in

biology: the positive use of metaphors is reflected in the use of

metaphorical language in molecular biology: the mechanistic

metaphor of information transaction between the macromolecules in animal beings, nucleic acid for instance, or the metaphor of signalling

within biological systems has led to the development of molecular and

evolutionary biology. Biological processes reportedly ‘edit’, ‘transcribe’ and ‘translate’ – these literary metaphors have helped

molecular biologists to communicate amongst their own discipline and

across related disciplines of medicine – pharmacology, for example. Literary metaphors “make extremely complicated molecular processes

intelligible by highlighting their functional components in a human, or

rather semiotic, reference frame. In this case, metaphors have helped

to drive science to new insights” (Chew / Laubichler 2003: 52). The

success of the message-passing metaphor in biology has impacted the

equally ambitious workers in particle physics: there are a number of

Metaphors in the Languages of Science 3

‘elementary’ particles that are exchanged between other particles and

thereby help the others to form a bond. These bonds are found in the

nuclei, where protons and neutrons are bound together through the

exchange of so-called mesons. Such exchanges take place through messenger particles “in deference to nomenclature for RNA” (Salam

1990: 39).

The negative, and nefarious, use of metaphors is perhaps best illustrated in the appropriation of scientific terms to describe people:

The extension of genetics to eugenics owed much of its popularity in the

United States and in Germany to its use of culturally resonant metaphors. Labeling people as a burden, a cancerous disease, or a foreign body

(Fremdkörper) conveyed the ‘threat’ to society in terms that people could

relate to in their respective historical and cultural settings. (Chew / Laubichler

2003: 52)

I am interested in the use of metaphors in specialist writing: writing

produced only for an intra-community audience – journal articles and

monographs aimed essentially at an audience that is within a specialism. The use of metaphors in learned writing appears to serve a

different purpose; perhaps, metaphorical language facilitates cohesion

and coherence within a community? Typically, studies of metaphor

are restricted to samples of texts usually published in popular science

magazines (de Beaugrande 1996).

2. Ways of wor(l)d-making

The philosopher Nelson Goodman has his own ways of word-making and for him “metaphor is no mere decorative rhetorical device but a

way we make our terms do multiple moonlighting service” (1978:

104). The multiple moonlighting of terms is evident, for example, in

the use of the term nucleus: in everyday language nucleus refers to a

kernel, in cell biology cells have a nucleus, and in nuclear physics, the

atom has a nucleus. In everyday language, we have nuclear family

and nuclear power, and the derivations of the metaphorical noun – the

Khurshid Ahmad 4

adjective nuclear and the verb to nucleate – moonlight in a number of

different subjects. The metaphor moonlighting service perhaps

summarises two or three decades of literature published in the

cognitive semantics on metaphor, where we see a number of terms moonlighting to describe the psycho-linguistic description of the

origins and uses of metaphors. Consider, for instance, the phrase the

great chain of being – which was used in 18th century biology – used in discussing why and how animal metaphors are used in the

description of human behaviour (Kövesces 2002).

The interest in the transition of metaphors from source- to

target-subject matter has been typically discussed in the context of

people’s use of this linguistic device. Recent work here dates back to

Lakoff’s (1987) anti-rationalist approach, which privileges bodily

experience in philosophical analysis. It is assumed that people’s or folk articulation of the possible worlds through language will allow a

deeper view into the workings of the human mind/brain. Indeed such a

position has been taken by pioneering biologists (Mendel) and psychologists (Freud and Jung) whose words have thrown much light

on how the human mind/brain works. A sympathetic interpretation of

the work of Lakoff and his colleagues can be found in Kövesces (2002), which describes three major classes of metaphor: structural,

ontological and orientational metaphors. Structural metaphors “enable

speakers to understand target A by means of the structure of source B”

(2002: 33) – for instance, the passing of time is understood in terms of

the motion of objects. Orientational metaphors “make a set of target

concepts coherent in our [sic] conceptual system” (2002: 35); for example, the concepts of ‘more’ and ‘less’ are explained through the

metaphorical use of ‘up’ and ‘down’ respectively, as in ‘speak up

please’, ‘keep your voice down’. Ontological metaphors are relevant to LSP studies in that such metaphors help us to conceive of our

“experiences in terms of objects, substances, and containers in

general, without specifying further the kind of object, substance or container” (2002: 251).

In the last century, metaphors have been used by scientists to

construct the edifice of both experimental and theoretical sciences.

This borrowing has been finessed by an erudite mathematical

framework. The synthesis of two semes or modes of expression

(linguistic and mathematical symbolism) have led to awe-inspiring


and awesome discoveries. This tradition of synthesising the two semes

– the linguistic seme relying on the use of metaphors to describe

human psychosocial behaviour, ranging from memorising to learning

and from emotions to consciousness, and mathematical symbolism, including logic and statistics – has had a similar consequence in terms

of awe-inspiring large-scale integration of semi-conducting devices

on a chip, nuclear power and remote-controlled devices for aggressive purposes and nuclear weapons. The development of the Internet is

suffused with metaphors that include the single term web and its

interesting, perhaps oxymoronic collocations like the semantic web

and the utilitarian term sets cluster around web services.

An example of metaphorical usage is the assignment of the

attributes of animate beings to inanimate beings. It is often argued that

the rational approach adopted by scientists has led to great discoveries and nowhere is this truer than in physics. The 20th century theories of

matter – the nuclear atom theory and the quantum theory of radiation

– borrow heavily from the terminology of astronomy and (classical, 19th century) physics. Newton’s abiding contribution was to introduce

a mathematical description of how planets moved around a star in the

‘celestial’ universe: the self-same equations could be used to describe the movements of objects on the earth – the proverbial apple falling to

the ground – or the terrestrial universe. The mathematical description

was extended to aquatic systems (a subject called hydrodynamics) and

produced the Newtonian grand unification, with the celestial,

terrestrial and aquatic universes described in one abstract framework

grounded in the notion of force. But the term force as used in modern science has had a difficult birth or rather difficult adaptation by the

community of scientists. The key term force originally referred to

armed men/violence or physical human coercion: a people-centred term requiring vitality and volition was transferred to the target

domain to mean ‘the agency that tends to change the momentum of a

massive body’. Note, the body in question refers to a neuter noun and has no reference to humans. The term energy related to human ‘vigour

of expression’ which, until the late 19th century, referred to vigour of

action or utterance, combines its original people-centred meaning with

the sense that energy is ‘a measure of the system’s ability to work’.

The transfer of animate attributes to inanimate beings and vice-

versa can be illustrated by the recent discussions in computing and

Khurshid Ahmad 6

neurobiology related to the twin notions of computers having

intelligence and the brain/mind being essentially a machine. A whole

branch of computing, artificial intelligence, is dedicated to finding

potential mappings between the mind/brain and ‘computer machinery’. Indeed, ‘Computing Machinery and Intelligence’ is the

title of a key paper on the subject by the pioneer Alan Turing in the

1950’s. Turing suggested that (intelligent) computers may play games and may be used in translating from one (human) language to another,

and his prophecy has come true in large measure. There is also a

contrary view: in ‘The Decline and Fall of the Mechanist Metaphor’

(Shanker 1987) the title of the paper comprises metaphorical

expressions in that its source is in history, referring to weaknesses in

the political and military establishments of imperial powers.

The motivation for using human metaphors for inanimate objects, and mechanistic metaphors for animate beings, is explained to

an extent by Feyerabend’s observations about the use of metaphors in

science: “the history of science […] does not just consist of facts and conclusions drawn from facts” but “contains ideas, interpretation of

facts” and “problems created by conflicting interpretations” (1993:

11). He goes on to suggest that scientific education is designed to discount the scientist’s “metaphysics, or his [/her] sense of humour”

such that scientific facts appear “independent of opinion, belief and

cultural background” (1993: 11). The case of the classical physicists

(Isaac Newton, Thomas Young) shows extensive focus on their

personal beliefs, sense of humour and how they borrowed words

established in pre-16th century English and metaphorically deployed

them to construct so-called natural philosophy (our physics).

The question is ‘how does the belief system of a group of

scientists assert itself in what would otherwise be regarded as a purely rational exercise where personal beliefs should play little or no role?’

Consider the metaphor of the planetary system – a star surrounded by

planets executing fixed orbits around the star – which was used to construct the edifice of the nuclear atom: the ‘star’ here was the

nucleus and the (subsequently) discovered electrons were the

metaphorical planets. The electrons executed fixed orbits around the

nucleus and only when electrons ‘jumped’ from one orbit to another

was energy released or absorbed in fixed (Planck’s) quanta of

radiation latterly ennobled as the ‘universal quantum of radiation’ or


h. The population of each orbit was carefully controlled through

properties of matter that only manifest themselves at very small scales

or quantum scales. There is anecdotal evidence that some authors

speculated that since electrons were planets there must be hills, valleys, rivers and seas on individual electrons. The original planetary

system, in turn, is based on Greek mythology and the Judeo-Christian

hypothesis of a helio-centric universe; recall that Galileo had to apologise to the Church of Rome when he declared that the earth was

not really the ‘centre’/star of the universe, but rather belonged to a

planetary system, one of many perhaps in the universe, and again one

of many planets.

Once transferred to the micro-world of atoms and nuclei, the

metaphor of the planetary system was re-transferred to the sub-nuclear

world and this time led to the development of nuclear physics. The question nuclear physicists asked was ‘how is it that the principal

constituents of a nucleus – protons and neutrons – are packed so

tightly in a nucleus?’ The answer proposed by Heidi Yukawa was that there was a nuclear force that was far more attractive than any other

force hitherto known to human beings. Enrico Fermi proposed that

neutrons and protons – so-called nucleons – form orbits in a nucleus, much like the electrons going round a nucleus. So is there something

like a ‘nucleus’ within the nucleus? The ingenious answer was that the

collective effect of the presence of the nucleons creates a virtual

nucleus within the nucleus. Late 20th century physics argues that

protons and neutrons are in themselves composite particles comprising

so-called quarks. In the new physics, the quark metaphor was borrowed partly from Hinduism and Buddhism, and is partly based on

an elusive character in James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake – Muster

Mark (Gell-Mann 1994, 1997).

2.1. Lexical inversion and lexicogenesis

Studies in the philosophy of science suggest yet another

transformation of a metaphorical usage of language – a ‘massive

shift’, almost an inversion, in the meaning of a metaphor

(Verschuuren 1986). Take the example of the planetary system again:

Brahe argued that sunrise was caused by the rising sun only to be

Khurshid Ahmad 8

contradicted successfully by Kepler who argued that sunrise is due to

a turning earth. When atomic and nuclear physicists borrowed the

planetary metaphor in atomic (and subsequently nuclear) physics, the

meaning of the term atom was inverted from something which was the epitomy of indivisibility to something which was divisible into its

constituent parts. An earlier inversion that established physics as a

subject in its own right, closer to a sub-division of philosophy (natural philosophy to be precise), was the notion of motion. Aristotle thought

that objects move because they have an in-built tendency to do so –

this was contradicted by Galileo, who argued that motion was caused

only when force is exerted on an object.

Lexical inversion, or the denial of an extant concept and its

replacement by a new concept whilst keeping the original term in

place, is a feature of bio-medicine as well. Let us consider one of the central themes in biology and now in medicine – the evolution of

species and its progeny, evolutionary biology. It would appear that the

concept of species is itself a surrogate of a rational construct, but this is not as true as it appears. Some recent discussions in evolutionary

biology about ‘species’ and, in particular, the views of an eminent

evolutionary biologist, naturalist, explorer, ornithologist and historian of science, Ernst Mayr, suggest that the status of the term is under

debate:

The species, together with the gene, the cell, the individual, and the local

population, are the most important units in biology. Most research in

evolutionary biology, […] and almost any other branch of biology deals with

species. How can one reach meaningful conclusions in this research if one

does not know what a species is and, worse, when different authors talk about

different phenomena but use the same word – species? (Mayr 2004: 171)

The lexicogenesis of the term ‘species’ shows how a range of

metaphors were used by the great and the good of biology over the last 300 hundred years or so to revise, refine and sometimes contradict

the extant meaning of the term. For the French biologist Buffon

(1707-1788), to whom the metaphor ‘The Great Chain of Being’ is

sometimes attributed, the notion of species was critical for a

systematic study of a living organism: the biological whole is divided

into classes, classes into genera, and genera into species (c. 1749).

Buffon’s reflection on the biological systems led him in the next 25


years to conclude that species are “a whole independent of number,

independent of time; a whole always living, always the same” (c.

1765). Darwin’s metaphor was ‘The Tree of Life’: species were the

“product of divine creation, and it is this that constitutes their reality”; each species has a species-specific essence – a set of characters which

remain fixed and permanent throughout the duration of its existence,

and which allow it to be captured in a definition. And the Tree of Life had explanatory power because, according to Darwin, “species are

immutable in that they cannot change into other species – varieties are

the limits of species variability”. The debate about species continues

apace and now the metaphor of species is central to conservation and

the ‘species problem’ has to be solved (Stamos 2003: 356).

Ernst Mayr’s 50 years in biology and its related branches shows

an evolution in his understanding of what a species is. In the 1940’s, Mayr (2004) notes that “species are groups of actually or potentially

interbreeding populations which are reproductively isolated”. In the

next 30 years or so he is more comfortable with his definition and drops the hedges ‘actually or potentially’: “Species are groups of

interbreeding populations that are reproductively isolated”. There is

then a shift in his position when 18 years later he observes that “modern biologists are almost agreed that there are real discontinuities

in organic nature, which delimit natural entities that are designated as

species”. Note the use of metaphors of space (discontinuities and

delimitation). In the next three years, Mayr was to re-define species as

“a reproductively isolated aggregate of populations which can

interbreed with one another because they share the same isolating mechanism”. The name of the abstract object – species – remains the

same, some of the basis of the definition is perhaps intact, especially

procreation, but the modern biologist neither invokes a deity nor merely uses the concept of species as a place-holder. Species were

once immutable but now there is a degree of mutation allowed.

2.2. What are metaphors for?

Hoffman (1985) lists 12 functions of metaphors which will help us to

close this section. According to him, metaphors can be divided into

three major categories: (i) metaphors for describing novelty at

Khurshid Ahmad 10

different levels of scientific description including hypothesising,

theorizing, conceptualizing; (ii) metaphors used for interpreting extant

theories; and (iii) metaphors for explaining and predicting the

consequences of theoretical concepts and experimental measurements (Table 1).

(a) Novelty

To suggest

new hypotheses, hypothetical concepts, entities, relations,

events, or observations;

new laws or principles; new models or refinements of old ones;

new theories/theoretical systems, or world views; new research methods or ideas for experiments or hypothesis

testing;

new methods for analyzing data;

To give meaning

to new theoretical concepts for unobservable or unobserved events;

To predict new phenomena or cause-effect relations;

(b) Interpretation

To suggest

choices between alternative hypotheses or theories,

(often) choice between more and less fruitful metaphors;

alterations or refinements in a theory;

To contrast theories or theoretical approaches;

(c) Explanation

To provide Scientific explanations in the form of metaphoric redescriptions;

To describe new phenomena or cause-effect relations;

Table 1. The three major categories of metaphor used in science and technology.

We now look at the different uses of metaphor in particle physics and

nuclear physics, two major areas of rational, objective and scientific investigation.

3. Quarks and leptons, parody and subversion: metaphors

and lexicogenesis in particle physics

Twenty-first century physics is concerned with three inter-related

notions: matter, force and energy. This trinity has some resonance


with the ancient Greek’s concern with a quartet of fundamental

entities: air, water, earth, and fire. The ancient Hindus had an octet of

fundamentals: five ‘gross elements’: earth, water, fire, wind and ether

and three ‘manas’: mind, conscience and ego (Prabhavananda / Isherwood 1947: 171-85).

The consolidation of a body of knowledge, now called physics,

relies critically on the metaphor of force. One ‘force’ that surrounds us is gravitational force. This force can be used to explain and to predict

(a) the ordered motion of planets, (b) the ebb and flow in aquatic

systems, and (c) the motion of physical objects on the earth. The term

is metaphorical in that its source is in terms of 17th century concepts

like anima, vis or kraft. It has been argued that the notion of force

actually shows a preoccupation with “the theme of potent, active

principles” (Holton 1973: 58). Einstein has argued that the curvature of space and time in effect determines gravity – the cause of

gravitational force.

The development of quantum theory and nuclear physics took place under the rubric of modern physics in 1887-1946 (cf. Jeans

1950). In this period, two radically new types of forces were

postulated: first, a strong nuclear force, exerted through the agency of mesons; which helps to explain some of the workings of atomic nuclei

– how a nucleus is bound together, for example, and why nuclei

disintegrate. Second, weak nuclear force, which manifests itself when

the atomic nuclei decay/transmute by emitting electrons from within

the nucleus: β-radioactivity, where a nucleus decays by emitting an

electron and a neutrino, shows that the left-right symmetry found to exist in all physical systems is violated during β-radioactivity. The

notion of force in post-modern physics is at considerable variance

with that in Newtonian physics. The strong nuclear force changes its attractive character to a repulsive one at very small distances; in

Newtonian mechanics forces do not change their nature, no matter the

distance. And forces do not ‘conspire’ to violate the fundamental principles of such systems, like for instance preferring the left to the

right. Nevertheless, the term force remains and the metaphor used

initially is preserved in the meaning, in a vague historical sense.

In the 1936-1970 period, physicists could study particles by (i)

examining cosmic ray tracks in photographic emulsions – a shower of

particles leaving tracks in emulsions sent up in balloons or on top of

Khurshid Ahmad 12

mountains; and (ii) by building accelerators or atom smashers to study

interaction amongst particles in laboratory conditions – particles were

accelerated to speeds close to that of light and bombarded on a variety

of targets. The reaction products were rich repositories of information. Cosmic rays have helped in the detection of an anti-particle – the

positron, which is an anti of the well-known electron, is a positively

charged electron. Then followed the discovery of the anti-proton, and anti-neutron. When a particle and its anti-particle collided then both

were annihilated and turned into energy. Nature appeared to be

symmetric – for every particle there was an anti-particle; in a few

cases when there were no anti-particles detected or predicted by

theory, the particle was declared its own anti. Very few particles are

stable – protons, electrons and photons are amongst the few; most

other particles decay in less than a billionth of a second! Cosmic rays and accelerators provided a wealth of particles:

mesons, for example, were an intermediate (meso) particle,

intermediate in mass between the ‘heavier’ nucleons and the lighter electrons. There were three kinds of mesons (positive, negative and

neutral pi-mesons) and mesons were fundamentally different from

nucleons and electrons and their antis. Pi-mesons were called bosons – they had an intrinsic property called spin, like all other particles, and

the value of spin was 1. Nucleons and electrons have spin value of ½

and are called fermions. Bosons ‘obey’ Bose-Einstein statistics and

fermions Fermi-Dirac statistics. Pi-mesons were initially called

Japanese electrons and the prefix pi was to distinguish these mesons

from another group of particles (accidentally) named mesons, which were subsequently called mu-mesons; the mu-mesons are fermions,

and are much lighter in mass than the pi-variety.

3.1. Strangeness and flavour in the (particle) zoo

In most of the observations it was found that some particles are

created in pairs; for example, a K-meson or kaon is always produced

together with its anti, and these particles took much longer to decay:

they were called strange particles and a fundamental property of

matter was thought up by physicists – that of strangeness. The number

of particles grew and grew and there was a need to categorise the


growing zoo (an affectionate term actually used in the particle physics

literature) – comprising at one time over 500 particles. Particles were

classified in families: protons and neutrons were classified as

nucleons, then they were subsumed into baryons, which included a number of unstable fermions including sigma, ki, omega, lambda and

delta particles, together with the strange particle hyperon. The other

major class was that of mesons. In addition, there were leptons, of course. Many of the elementary particles were energy peaks found in

various reactions involving other particles – called resonances. These

families in many ways had a Wittgensteinian resemblance: no obvious

unifying factor, except for spins, but they appeared to share nebulous

properties. The family metaphor led to the elementary particle zoo in

the 1960’s: the zoo metaphor was complete with the announcement of

particles births and deaths. ‘Birth’ announcements, still published occasionally in learned physics journals, accompanied the detection of

a fundamental particle in laboratory conditions. The obituaries were

essentially errata sheets announcing errors in the experimental procedure/technique that led to a wrongful report of birth – so that the

particle-that-after-all-was-not-a-particle was declared dead.

Twentieth century physics introduced the notion of fundamental or elementary particles of matter. All matter is supposed to be made

of atoms, a 15th century concept, and we are now told to believe that

all matter is made up of quarks and leptons. During the 1960’s,

Murray Gell-Mann, partially inspired by the eight-fold way of the

Hindus and partly James Joyce, was responsible for the introduction

of the term quark. The post-modern (post 1950’s) physicist does not use sonorous terms like fundamental particle or building blocks of the

universe, but simply refers to ‘elementary units’: quarks and leptons.

And then there are gluons, particles exchanged during interactions between quarks and leptons which ‘glue’ matter. This has led to a new

term, quagma, a composite of quarks and gluon matter; there is a

resonance between the terms magma (in geology) and quagma in particle physics. To sum up, physicists now claim that there are six

different types (or flavours) of quarks and six different leptons. The

six quarks are in turn divided into three generations.

The terminology used by the new physicists (c. 1970 onwards)

had an element of parody and subversion. Gell-Mann, the inventor of

the abiding concept of quark, has suggested that the precedents for

Khurshid Ahmad 14

naming conventions, rooted in a ‘pretentious Greek word’ are not very

encouraging. For example, one particle was named after a

hypothesised property which it was deemed to possess but “turned out

later not to be an important property, or even, in some cases, a correct one […] so one might as well invent a zany, relatively meaningless

name, and have fun” (1997: 164). Quarks started life as a purely

mathematical concept (Gell-Mann 1964) used to elaborate certain theoretical constructs in elementary particle physics. Even today there

is a touch of abstractness about this elementary unit, as we are told by

one US government laboratory “While an atom is tiny, the nucleus is

ten thousand times smaller than the atom and the quarks and electrons

are at least ten thousand times smaller than that. We don't know

exactly how small quarks and electrons are; they are definitely smaller

than 10-18

meters, and they might literally be points, but we do not know” (Lawrence Berkley Labs 2006).

3.2. Enter James Joyce in the zoo

These elusive particles appear like characters in a literary fiction text. Gell-Mann unravels this mystery for us:

In 1963, when I assigned the name ‘quark’ to the fundamental constituents of

the nucleon [protons and neutrons], I had the sound first, without the spelling,

which could have been ‘kwork’. Then in one of my occasional perusals of

Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word ‘quark’ in the

phrase “three quarks for Muster Mark”. Since ‘quark’ (meaning for one thing,

the cry of a gull) was clearly intended to rhyme with ‘Mark’ as well as ‘bark’, I had to find an excuse to pronounce it as ‘kwork’ […] [The] phrases [that]

occur in the book are partially determined by calls for drinks at the bar. I

argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry “Three

quarks for Muster Mark” might be “Three quarts for Mister Mark”. […] In any

case the number three fitted perfectly the quarks [which] occur in nature. […]

The recipe for making a neutron or proton out of quarks is, roughly speaking, Take three quarks. (1994: 180-1)

Gell-Mann introduces the term by arguing that “a simpler and more

elegant scheme can be constructed [for classifying elementary

particles – baryons and mesons] if we allow non-integral values for

the charges. […] We then refer to the members u[p], d[own] and


s[trange] of the triplet as ‘quarks’ […] q and the members of the anti-

triplet as anti-quarks q” (1964: 214). He concludes his landmark paper

by noting that “it is fun to speculate about the ways quarks would

behave as if they were physical particles of finite mass (instead of pure mathematical entities as they would be in the limit of infinite

mass)” (1964: 215). Fritzsch further elaborates on Gell-Mann’s choice

of term and suggests that “Joyce’s novel is full of plays on words that are difficult to understand. […] Mr Finn in the novel appears as Mr

Mark, and the three quarks denote the three children of Mr Finn, by

whom he himself is represented from time to time” (1983: 64). And,

in a remarkable leap of the imagination from the novelist Joyce to the

scientist Gell-Mann, Fritzsch concludes: “Thus the association with

particle physics becomes clear. The proton is associated with Mr Finn;

under certain circumstances the proton acts as if it had three quarks’ (1983: 64).

So we now have two basic types of quarks: up-type and down-

type quarks. There are three generations of quarks, each having an up-type and a down-type: up-type quark flavours are up, charm and top;

down-type quark flavours are down, strange, and bottom. Again,

flavour is a fundamental property of ‘matter’ but has nothing to do with the perception of flavour. The lightest flavour is the up quark and

the heaviest is the bottom quark. Most quarks, despite their permanent

‘confinement’ inside baryons or mesons, have been detected

indirectly. Particle physicists have therefore been creating neologisms.

The evolution of species in biology is paralleled in particle

physics by the decoupling of erstwhile elementary particles. The evolution of our universe, according to physicists, from its origin in

time (nearly 10-44 seconds after the Creation) to the formation of

galaxies (about 1013 seconds after the Creation) has led to the

proliferation of building blocks in a universe which itself evolved in

stages. Each stage in the evolution of the universe comprises the

‘decoupling’ of an elementary(?) particle into two particles costing less and less energy; each evolutionary stage is characterised by the

breaking of historical symmetry. The last of the decouplings took

place about 102 seconds after the creation of the universe. Before that

(10-6 seconds after the Creation) there was a quark-nuclear transition

and so on. The fact that all particles were ‘one’ at some distance in

time, about 10-44 seconds after ‘creation’, has led to the notion of

Khurshid Ahmad 16

super-symmetry (SUSY), i.e. that bosons and fermions are symmetric:

each boson has a fermion equivalent and vice versa. Each particle has

a super-symmetric partner – the sparticle. The fermions, particles with

spin half, have a postulated bosonic-partner, whose name is built prefixing an s-. The quark has a squark; the lepton a slepton; and the

neutrino a sneutrino. The boson, with spin 1, has a fermionic-partner

with an -ino suffix: the photon has a photino; the gluon has a gluino; the w-boson has a wino; and the z-boson a zino. The boson with spin

zero (known as Higgs-boson) has a shiggs.

3.3. From religion, poetry and heraldry to nuclear physics

Physicists talk about the stability of a nucleus in terms of the number of neutrons and protons within it. In very stable nuclei like helium (2

protons and 2 neutrons), carbon (6 protons and 6 neutrons) and

oxygen (8 neutrons and 8 protons), the ratio is one to one. But there are other, heavier, highly stable nuclei with far greater numbers of

neutrons than protons – 92 protons and 128 neutrons in the lead

nucleus. There appears to be a linear relation between the number of neutrons and protons for ensuring stability. Almost all nuclei have

isotopes – more neutrons than in the more frequently occurring variety

but the same number of protons. Thus carbon-13 (7 neutrons and 6

protons) is unstable and decays spontaneously; the element uranium

only occurs in an unstable form U-238 (92 protons and 146 neutrons)

but its isotopes are even more unstable. More recently, nuclear physicists have developed methods and techniques for producing

neutron-rich, short-lived isotopes of a number of nuclei: reported

isotopes include a helium isotope with up to 8 neutrons – 6 more than the 2 neutrons in the stable variety, carbon isotope with up to 16

neutrons (13 more than the stable variety) and so on. A number of

isotopes have been produced for different elements and their radius measured. In some cases it was found that the radius of one unstable

isotope was unusually large: the additional neutrons were too distant

from the stable core. These were called halo nuclei. I will discuss the

use of this metaphor, transferred from poetry, religion, and astronomy

to nuclear physics.


The study of unstable isotopes helps nuclear physicists to study

nuclei at the ‘edge of stability’ and to infer something about nuclear

forces. We already have two spatial metaphors: first, the idealized

(one-dimensional) line standing in for the concept of a directly proportional relationship between the number of neutrons and protons;

direct proportionality is plotted as a graph and the graph is a straight

line.. And, second, the metaphor of a (two-dimensional) edge. The line of ‘stability’ is an idealization: for Helium 6, the two extra-

neutrons are distant enough not be subjected to nuclear forces within

the otherwise stable core of the Helium nucleus (2 protons and 2

neutrons) but they still are sufficiently attached to the core to form a

‘nucleus’. The extra neutrons appear to ‘drip’ out of the Helium-6

nucleus, thus forming a halo – a kind of neutron ‘dust’ around the

stable core, much like the dust particles that surround our Moon and, under certain conditions, give the semblance of a halo.

Let us now look at some evidence of the incorporation of the

various metaphors associated with the so-called halo nuclei, which are neutrons dripping towards the dripline. A further specialisation of this

sub-branch of nuclear physics illustrates how a metaphor has been

borrowed even from heraldry – namely from an inscription in the seal of the Princes of Borromeo (a 15th century kingdom in what is now

Italy). The evidence is from a 1.32 million words corpus created from

279 documents – journal articles, books, theses, conference

announcements – written by nuclear physicists between 1970 and

2005 – a kind of post-modern nuclear physics corpus.

The dripline (also written drip line) acts as a line in space: so things may happen at, above, along, below, near, or far from the

metaphorical line. Below is a concordance of the use of spatial

colligates of the dripline drawn from our corpus of post-modern nuclear physics. This includes nuclear pairing correlations,

wavefunctions, exotic nuclei, and nuclear halos at the dripline. As if

to reassert the metaphor, it also talks of nuclei ‘well past the literal dripline’.

Khurshid Ahmad 18

nuclear pairing

correlations

at the dripline

particle decay modes at the dripline

single particle states and

wavefunctions

at the dripline

structure in light nuclei at the neutron dripline has given new

impetus

stability and exotic nuclei at the neutron dripline

nuclear halos are

expected

along

the

drip-

lines

where nucleon

single-particle

can be pursued to

measure

the

entire

dripline for heavy nuclei

within a few nucleons of where

the

dripline is presently

anticipated

The dripline is also used in the abstract, with references to the study, investigation and access to nuclei:

studying nuclei along the proton dripline

preliminary investigations of

nuclei

at the dripline

offer access to nuclei right at the dripline

The term halo is also used in a descriptive sense, as in: a halo of diffuse neutron

neutron halo of 11Li(thium) nucleus

or halo of valence particles

the halo of Li(thium)

Typical for specialist writing, halo appears as an adjectival-noun, as in

different kinds of halo nuclei and with reference to the properties of a

halo nucleus – as for density distribution within a halo nucleus:

known halo nucleus 6He(lium)

neutron halo nucleus 15C(arbon)

neutron halo nucleus 11Be(rrylium)

neutron halo nucleus 6He(lium)

proton halo nucleus 8B(oron)

halo nucleus elastic scattering

halo nucleus density distributions

two-neutron halo nucleus


However, there are many more examples of the use of the term as a

component of a compound:

halo bound state halo orbit

neutron halo breakup

reactions

halo orbitals

neutron halo candidate halo particle

wavefunction

halo characteristic halo particle mass

halo charge halo phenomena

halo clusterization halo physics

halo configuration halo picture

halo constituents halo projectile

borromean halo continuum halo properties

halo core halo proton

the halo degrees of

freedom

halo radii

the halo densities proton halo reactions

transverse halo density halo region

neutron halo distribution halo sizes

the halo distribution resonance halo sources

borromean halo excitation

structure

halo spectrum

low halo excitation

energies

halo state

halo excitation

functions

proton halo structure

halo excitation

spectrum

pronounced halo system

halo fragments and

target

halo type of

systems

halo model halo wave functions

One of the contemporary terms used instead of halo was skin. The

extra neutrons in neutron-rich nuclei act like a skin around the stable core:

Khurshid Ahmad 20

a significant neutron skin appears

best examples of neutron skin behaviour

whether [..] a neutron skin does exist with a

have neutron halo or skin structures

possibility of halo and skin systems in heavier nuclei

the rapidly increasing neutron skin thickness as a function of a

for the 6He(lium) neutron skin thickness was about

The term skin is used far less frequently now than in the early days of

artificially created neutron-rich nuclei: halo is used about 12 times

more often than skin – the plural halos is used 10 times more often

than skins. If we compare the use of the two terms in our specialist

corpus and in the British National Corpus, it turns out that there is a

pronounced and noticeable propensity for using the term halo – which

is 596 times more frequent in the specialist corpus than in the BNC,

calculated by comparing the relative frequency of the term in the

specialist corpus and in the BNC; the plural is used 765 times more often. The term skin is used with about the same relative frequency in

both corpora (Table 2).

Term f f/N Weirdness Term f f/N Weirdness

halo 1284 0.097% 596 skin 101 0.008% 0.95

halos 81 0.006% 765 skins 8 0.001% 1.1

Table 2. A contrastive distribution of keywords in our nuclear physics corpus (N=1.32 Million tokens; 279 documents, published between 1970-2005,

mainly American English).

Discussion of halo nuclei includes a reference to a coat of arms: a

transfer of meaning from heraldry into nuclear physics. The neutron-

rich Helium isotope that has a skin or halo of 2 extra neutrons presents

a special problem for physicists, as the system He-

4+neutron1+neutron2 appears to be much longer lived than any of its binary constituents: He-4+neutron, and di-neutron (neutron1+

neutron2). It was suggested that there are three sub-systems in Helium-

6: He-4+neutron1, He-4+neutron2, and the di-neutron. These can be


visualized as forming three intersecting rings but if one ring is taken

out all three fall apart. For this reason they are usually known as

Borromean Rings, after the heraldic symbol used by the Princes of

Borromeo, in northern Italy:

‘Borromean’ is also used as an adjective to describe a different type of halo nuclei. The full term borromean halo nucleus/nuclei is used to

describe its creation, properties, and break-up as shown in the

concordances below:

excitations of 2-neutron borromean halo nuclei

continuum spatial correlations in borromean halo nuclei

correlations in borromean halo nuclei

breakup of borromean halo nuclei diffractive breakup of borromean halo nuclei

relativistic fragmentation of borromean halo nuclei

ground state properties of borromean halo nuclei as 6He, 11Li

series of borromean halo nuclei such as 11Li ,

explorations of spectra of borromean halo nuclei

continuum spectra of the borromean halo nuclei

And, sometimes the ‘halo’ is ellipsed in the compound:

bound hyper-radial wavefunctions for borromean nuclei

continuum spectra for borromean nuclei Halo phenomena in light borromean nuclei

nuclear reactions of borromean nuclei bound states of borromean nuclei

internal structure of borromean nuclei neutron-rich double borromean 8He nucleus

Khurshid Ahmad 22

4. Afterword and thanks to Goodman

I would like to end with Nelson Goodman’s observation about the

creativity in the use of language shown by scientists:

The artist’s resources – modes of reference, literal and non-literal, linguistic

and non-linguistic, denotational and non-denotational, in many media – seem

more varied and impressive than the scientist’s. But to suppose that science is

flatfootedly linguistic, literal, and denotational would be to overlook, for

instance, the analog instrument often used, the metaphor used, the metaphor

involved in measurement when a numerical scheme is applied in a new realm,

and the talk in current physics and astronomy of charm and strangeness and

black holes. Even if the ultimate product of science, unlike that of art, is a

literal, verbal or mathematical, denotational theory, science and art proceed in

much the same way with their searching and building. (Goodman 1978: 106-7)

It is the use of metaphor that underpins creativity both in the arts and

the sciences. The study of metaphor can enrich work in LSP.

Particularly in the study of terminology, sometimes due to its commitment to clarity in human communication and sometimes due to

one-to-one correspondence between a term and a concept, LSP may

appear ‘flatfootedly linguistic, literal, and denotational’. However, the

emphasis in terminology on organising concepts with a degree of

clarity and consistency, may stem from a rightful distrust of non-

literal reference. Metaphor can be regarded as the study of how one

human or a group of human beings relate their often unusual insights

and speculations of what there is through the agency of language. In

the limited evidence presented in this chapter, we might be led to believe that language invariably involves the use of linguistic

metaphors in the writings of scientists, but language is partly innately

endowed and in part influenced by the culture and environment of its speakers. It is the cultural and environmental influences that may

motivate the use of metaphors, and not surprisingly metaphors take on

their own scientific or specialist life becoming the centre-piece of

scientific writing. Terminology and metaphor appear intertwined at

least at the beginning of a science; subsequently, perhaps, when the

metaphor dies, scientists have fun and indulge in parody.


References

Ahmad, Khurshid 1997. Deconstructing Knowledge and Scientific Writing: Acquisition and Representation of Knowledge. In

Lundquist, Lita / Picht, Heribert / Qvistgaard, Jacques (eds)

Proceedings of the 11th European Symposium on Language for

Special Purposes. Copenhagen, Denmark, 18-22 August 1997.

Copenhagen: Copenhagen Business School, 25-53.

de Beaugrande, Robert A. 1996. LSP and Terminology in a New

Science of Text and Discourse. In Galinski, Christian / Schmitz,

Klaus-Dirk (eds) Proceedings of TKE (Terminology and

Knowledge Engineering) 1996. Frankfurt: Indeks Verlag, 12-34. Chew, Matthew K. / Laubichler, Manfred D. 2003. Perceptions of

Science: Natural Enemies – Metaphor or Misconception?.

Science 301/5629, 52-3. Feyerabend, Paul 1993. Against Method. London: Verso.

Friztsch, Harald 1983. Quarks: The Stuff of Matter. London: Allan

Lane. Gell-Mann, Murray 1964. A Schematic Model of Baryons and

Mesons. Physics Letters 8/3, 214-5.

Gell-Mann, Murray 1994. The Quark and the Jaguar: Adventures in

the Simple and the Complex. London: Little Brown.

Gell-Mann, Murray 1997. Three Quarks for Muster Mark. Interview

transcript in Wolpert, Lewis / Richards, Alison (eds) Passionate

Minds: The Inner World of Scientists. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 159-65.

Goodman, Nelson 1978. Ways of Worldmaking. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Hoffman Robert R. 1985. Some Implications of Metaphor for

Philosophy and Psychology of Science. In Paprotté, Wolf /

Dirven, René (eds) The Ubiquity of Metaphor. Metaphor in

Language and Thought. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 327-80.

Holton, Gerald 1973. Thematic Origins of Scientific Thought: Kepler

to Einstein. Cambridge (Mass.): Harvard University Press.

Khurshid Ahmad 24

Jeans, James 1950. The Growth of Physical Sciences. London:

Readers Union / Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Kövecses, Zoltán 2002. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford:

Oxford University Press. Lakoff, George 1987. Women, Fire And Dangerous Things: What

Categories Reveal About The Mind. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Lawrence Berkley Labs 2006. Scale of the Atom? http://

particleadventure.org/particleadventure/frameless/scale.html.

Mayr, Ernst 2004. What Makes Biology Unique: Considerations on

the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline. Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press.

Prabhavananda, Swami / Isherwood, Christopher 1953. The Song of

God - Bhagvad Gita. London: Phoenix House. Salam, Abdus 1990. Unification of Fundamental Forces: The First of

1988 Dirac Memorial Lectures. Lecture notes compiled by

Johnathan Evans and Gerard Watts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Shanker, Stuart. G. 1987. The Decline and Fall of The Mechanist

Metaphor. In Born, Rainer (ed.) Artificial Intelligence: The Case Against. London: Croom Helm, 72-131.

Stamos, David M. 2003. The Species Problem: Biological Species,

Ontology, and the Metaphysics of Biology. Oxford: Lexington

Books.

Turing, Alan M. [1950] 1990. Computing Machinery and Intelligence.

In Boden, Margaret (ed.) The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 40-66.

Verschuuren, Gerard M.N. 1986. Investigating the Life Sciences: An

Introduction to the Philosophy of Science. Oxford: Pergamon Press.

metaphors in the languages of science · 2006. 10. 10. · origins and uses of metaphors. consider,...

Documents