Freedom of Science

Physicist say

it’s semantics, not physics. Move on, there is no science in semantics.”

Is there a word without meaning?¹

Are there words with multiple meanings?²

Physicists love those. Any word that means the same thing both in physics and outside of physics is called philosophy and it must be made precise by corrupting it into a term of art. There are no terms in physics that are not terms of art.³

All symbols in physics including words and numbers are context sensitive.⁴ This rule is inviolable. It exists because this is how physicists assert their authority. Remember that the currency of physics is authority. The more authority a physicist garners the richer he is. Rich means famous in physics.

If you hear a physicist refuting your mathematical argument by saying “you are playing word games, that’s semantics” you know that he is asserting his authority in order to define the term in question his way.⁵ His definition is always one of the legal definitions he culls from physics canon.

Is there a difference between investigating the meaning of a symbol and “doing physics.”

Yes. Doing physics means moving around legal symbols by using ritual elimination methods internally known as derivation and/or computation.

Looking at meaning allows us to understand what a symbol means. This is always a useful thing to do in order to understand something. Since physicists are not into understanding anything but interpreting the canon they are not interested in meaning. For physicists if it is legal it is legal. No further understanding is needed. And no further understanding must be sought.

It helps to understand if a symbol used by physicists is a quantity or merely a placeholder that physicists are marketing as a quantitative law.

Example:

Let’s say physicists named A to mean three different things:⁶

A = B = C = D

How do we know if A is a quantity or a placeholder? We may never know. Usually this is a trade secret that physicists do not let outside world know until they get a multimillion dollar book contract. In the mean time if you ask nicely a physicist will interpret the term for you depending on the context and the gauge theory used by the high learning institution who employs him to interpret such terms. This means that you will never get the same advice from two different physicists.⁷

Looking at the meaning of A we see that it has three meanings: B, C and D. Usually there will be a standard ritual that will allow physicists to cancel some or all of the terms B, C and D and even A and replace all with E or with the cosmological constant.

Furthermore, physicists may have named A several different marketing names. This is always good business because it introduces another layer of doctoral sophistry to publish on. These marketing labels are added to make the labels marketable in the marketplace of ideas. This market is controlled by the big media who purchases these labels from physicists for pittance and sells them to us with an exorbitant markup as the cutting edge of science.

Another benefit of the marketing labels is that the labels morph in due time into their marketing names. Profiting from creating confusion between what is map and what is terrain and then selling the map as valuable real estate has been one of the staples of Doctors of all kinds. Doctors of Theology indulged themselves in selling slots in heaven. The more sophisticatedly elegant Doctors of Philosophy today peddle just the marketing labels as the real thing.

Therefore the entire physics is semantic physics.

Here “semantic” is used in the meaning that physicists ascribe to it:

semantics = doctoral sophistry monopoly

If physics were truly be semantic physics it would be science. Meaning is important. Meaning let’s us go beyond labels and understand underlying concepts. But attempting to eliminate physics labels to expose 18th century Newtonian religious doctrines underlying physics is anathema. Any physicist who even thinks about questioning doctrines and labels would be guilty of thoughtcrime and would be exiled to academic Siberia.

Physics is not semantics but polemics. Physics is made of context sensitive labels that physicists endow with meaning by using their authority. Then market these labels as laws of nature.

1. Are there points without position? [↩]
2. Are there crossing lines? [↩]
3. Is this true? I would welcome any exceptions. [↩]
4. Physics is a manifold where each symbol is locally well-defined and globally well-defined. Since both local and global are terms of arts themselves every term in physics is well-defined and rigorous. [↩]
5. If you are not playing physicists’ word games that’s a) semantics, b) philosophy, c) history depending on the context. [↩]
6. In the context of physics A is uniquely defined plus or minus 3. [↩]
7. Similarity with lawyers noted. [↩]

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