David Steinhardt started the Pure NKS I session with the discussion of the naming of new intellectual ideas. His opinion was the name New Kind of Science "stinks." He told an anecdote that I wasn't familiar with, that Einstein wanted to call the theory of relativity the theory of invariance because of the invariance of the laws of physics in any reference frame. I was relieved to hear that the naming wasn't Einstein's idea, since I have often bemoaned the misinterpretation of the theory by people that think that it boils down to a statement that "everything is relative." I was quite sympathetic to a discussion of a better naming for our infant field, since I know some people have been turned off by the name chosen, but he didn't seem to have positive suggestions for a better one.
Comments