Re:Autism and Asperger's Syndrome: The ‘Little Professors’ (...
by chongli on Saturday December 15, 2018 @12:53PM
(#18689448)
what makes this a form of autism, of all things?
Autism isn't a fact about the world, it's a category we use to group traits we think belong together. What's actually going on may be varied and rather complex.
We do this with a lot of words over time. The word atom, for example, means indivisible. For a long time we believed atoms were the fundamental units of matter. To say to a pre-nuclear physicist that we can now "split the atom" is to speak nonsense; to utter a contradiction.
The same goes for universe. Centuries ago, people thought the earth was the centre of the universe and that the stars and other heavenly bodies were fixed upon spheres. Then came the sun-centred model of the solar system, and the universe grew a little bit larger. More recently, the Hubble ultra-deep field dramatically expanded our view of the universe yet again.
But now there are physicists who speak very seriously about about the idea of a multiverse. What the heck does that even mean? It means we decided, after a certain point, to stop changing the meaning of the word universe.
Autism isn't a fact about the world, it's a category we use to group traits we think belong together. What's actually going on may be varied and rather complex.
We do this with a lot of words over time. The word atom, for example, means indivisible. For a long time we believed atoms were the fundamental units of matter. To say to a pre-nuclear physicist that we can now "split the atom" is to speak nonsense; to utter a contradiction.
The same goes for universe. Centuries ago, people thought the earth was the centre of the universe and that the stars and other heavenly bodies were fixed upon spheres. Then came the sun-centred model of the solar system, and the universe grew a little bit larger. More recently, the Hubble ultra-deep field dramatically expanded our view of the universe yet again.
But now there are physicists who speak very seriously about about the idea of a multiverse. What the heck does that even mean? It means we decided, after a certain point, to stop changing the meaning of the word universe.