More punning

I've written before about my appreciation of puns, and their ability to be used as a link between seemingly disparate topics. Let me give you an example, a personal favorite of mine:

I before E=M except after C²

This may not seem like a pun at first, but stick with me.

This pun combines the spelling rule "I before E except after C" with Einsteins' Theory of Relativity. No pun so far. Then you might realize that Einsteins' name violates the spelling rule twice in only eight letters. To be fair, the spelling rule only applies to English spelling, and only loosely. So maybe it should be "I before E except after C, but not at all if you're Einstein". The cultural relativity revealed in the pun parallels the relativity of the speed of light in Einsteins' E=MC². This leads us (by commodious vicus of recirculation) to Heisenbergs' uncertainty principal. Our models of the world are just that: models. They tell us not about reality, but about what we are prepared to say about reality. This is the premise of Korzybski, who put the idea this way: "The map is not the territory". The intercutting of ideas about language and ideas about physics seems to be the product of the fact that our language fails to be able to give a decent accounting of the current models of physics. Our language programs us to think in Aristotelian terms of either "A" or "not A". In physics, the multi model approach allows physicists to accept mutually contradictory theories like the particle/wave duality. To do this is to abandon the "either/or" catagories of Aristotelian logic that are built into our language. One cannot say: "A photon is a particle". One can say: "a photon should behave as a particle under the following laboratory conditions".

See, puns behave like our friends, under certain laboratory conditions.

I Adore Thee! IAO!