Viswanathan K's Thoughts

How does one check whether language reflects reality? Or if it is a lens that affects what we perceive and register? At this point, Europeans realized none of their languages could help answer the question – they were too similar, and had intermixed too much. So they began to pay attention to the languages of far off places, including the so-called “primitives”, writes Guy Deutscher in Through the Language Glass . “The deficiencies that Gladstone and Geiger had uncovered were replicated exactly in living languages all over the world… (for example) red was always the first of the prismatic colours to receive a name.”   On the other hand, the eyesight data contradicted the idea of “defective colour vision” – no tribe was found that couldn’t make out the difference among colours. What had seemed impossible was now a reality – even if people could notice a difference, they didn’t always bother to assign it a word.   Magnus now tweaked his theory. Agreed, he said, everyo...

“Light years”. It is one of those highly misleading units in science. It suggests we are talking about time: light years . Instead, it is a unit for distance: the distance light would travel in those years . Why come up with such misleading names, right? Except in one scenario, where it is the perfect unit, as I discovered while reading Cixin Liu’s sci-fi novel, The Dark Forest where mankind makes contact with an alien civilization. But it is not human-to-alien contact, but radio contact (radio signals sent into space). Now the distance between the human and alien is stated in (what else?) light years. The aliens then decide to come to earth. But of course, they can’t travel at the speed of light, which means it would take them centuries to get here. See why it is the perfect unit now? All we want to know is how long it will take them to get here. After all, if the aliens are hostile, surely having centuries to prepare for their arrival is a good thing, right? And if they’...