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At 12:43 25 03 2005 , the following was received:
At the risk of sounding like a former president, what do you mean by
"real"?
Regards,
Jack
Jack, I don't much like the word "real" to describe this sort of
concept. In my initial post I used the word "reify" -- You can look this
up if you wish -- I later reluctantly used the word "real" in quotes
because others had use this word and I was quoting them.
In retrospect I should not have done this.
Physicists frequently reify or anthropomorphize a concept -- which laudably
adds a bit of color to a rather dull discussion for students -- but we
should make this coloring clear both to our students __and__ ourselves. --
especially in our discussions here. Otherwise we have posts of which we
understand the words per se but not the content - as has been pointed out
elsewhere recently .
Jim