another article worth reading

Lisa Randall, in this article, points to, among other things, one of the problems that has been created by "colloquial terminology" in scince. Dewey claimed, in Public and its Problems, that science was unintelligible to people because of the dense terminology they used. It seems the problem lies more in the signified than the signifier.

Scientists often employ colloquial terminology, which they then assign a specific meaning that is impossible to fathom without proper training. The term "relativity," for example, is intrinsically misleading. Many interpret the theory to mean that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. Yet although the measurements any observer makes depend on his coordinates and reference frame, the physical phenomena he measures have an invariant description that transcends that observer's particular coordinates. Einstein's theory of relativity is really about finding an invariant description of physical phenomena. Indeed, Einstein agreed with the suggestion that his theory would have been better named "Invariantentheorie." But the term "relativity" was already too entrenched at the time for him to change.