There's been a debate going around about naming & conventions for emerging technologies, and whether we should avoid names with an attached stigma to foster research in a less socio-politically charged environment.

Basically, in English this translates to "should we call Antigravity, 'Antigravity', or something more politically correct, like 'counter-gravity'". The same dilemma applies to what different people call "Fringe Science, Alt-Science, Frontier-Science, Protestant-Science, or just plain pseudo-science". In short, these terms have baggage, leading us to the core question about what this all means:

1. What terms don't have baggage?
2. Can socio-political / emotional baggage be useful, or even sometimes good?
3. Since new terms pick up baggage, is it worth the effort?
4. Is changing a term to eliminate this baggage really honest?

Most of us picked on the social-science majors in college, but I've had to eat my words on this smug negativity, and you might have to as well. The problem is that no matter how rigorous the formulas may be, ALL science is social-science, because it's ultimately all built by human beings, and interpreted through our personal & shared cultural beliefs & ideals.

Futurist Ray Kurzweil promotes an associated idea, that "all science is information science", because it ultimately enters through our 5-senses, which only serve to collect information. He's missing something, though,  because the mind filters more than any of the senses do. The biggest filters are the ones we don't even realize we have...they're deeply ingrained ideas that we develop over time, sometimes from such a young age that they're not really even opinions: they're a part of our psyche.

Even mainstream science isn't immune to this: "nuclear research" may conjure up threatening images of nuclear-holocaust, and "nanotech" might bring to mind over-hyped startups in Silicon Valley, or maybe swarms of killer bugs from a Michael Crichton novel.

The Bible & most religious texts talk a lot about "naming", which all of them agree is powerfully good or bad magic, depending on the name. It's not about the name, though -- it's about the way our minds work, because we associate a multiplicity of ideas with a specific name, and saying or even thinking the name can bring them all back into sharp contrast.

Names let us define concepts intellectually, and allow us to file the concept away in our mind without examining it more. That's why the scariest movies never actually describe the monster -- it remains an unknown, and because the mind can't process it, it remains frightening. When we understand something, we own the concept in our minds -- and naming the pieces is a key to understanding.

Let's talk Kubrick for a second: When I was a kid, Mom used to talk about how "nobody understood 2001: A Space Odyssey", and also about how powerful the movie was. Apparently, nobody knew what the monolith was...it was big and mysterious, and brought some religious dogma to mind while simultaneously scaring the heck out of the audience. Now I'll ruin it for you, if you don't already know:

"The Monolith" in 2001 was a Von Neumann Probe -- a self-replicating robot-probe described in detail in the book by Arthur C. Clarke. It's a cheap way to explore the universe, and that's about it. Stanley Kubrick knew this, but he also knew something else -- explaining the concept removed the mystery, and took away the power. He cut the explanation from the script, and the resulting movie became the epic that we know today.

Kubrick used this trick in a few of his movies -- if you've ever seen "Eyes Wide Shut", you've seen another implementation of this strategy. In short, Tom Cruise stumbles into a cult during the movie, which remains mysterious because it's never explained. No name, no idea, and no reason behind it. The strategy was different this time, though -- Kubric used this to shift focus from the cult itself to the character's internal realizations about life, and ultimately about ideas. The moral of the story was simple -- "there are things that aren't supposed to be known". They remain nameless ...

This isn't the case for gravity-research, however. We have constant opportunities to expand our knowledge of gravity, but these need to rest on the realization that we don't currently know much about this force. We have a good idea how it works, but we don't know what it is -- and without a better fundamental knowledge of the origins of gravity, dwelling on the semantics ultimately distracts from more pressing research goals.

Rush Limbaugh favors the phrase, "words mean things", but he rarely defines it. The meaning in the words comes from common usage, which in the case of Antigravity is exactly the notion that I try to convey. People sometimes ask me, "what is Antigravity?", but that's not what they're really asking. The real question is "how does it work?", since our culture has provided ample background information on what Antigravity is. That's why skeptics hung up on semantics always resort to questions like, "is a blimp an Antigravity device"? -- because they know from shared cultural values that it clearly isn't.

So what's in a name? In the case of "Antigravity", it has value because it recognizes our dreams of reaching the stars, and acknowledges the last 50 years of science-fiction that have told us in detail that there's a better way to do it than using a rocket. The term Antigravity isn't a force -- it's a technology that interacts with gravity to make possible the kind of travel that we've seen in Star Trek, Star Wars, and so many TV-series that it's impossible to keep count. This cinema represents our dreams, and making it a reality is also the realization of those dreams.

Antigravity is then an umbrella term, and I honestly don't see this as a bad thing. It's a collection of ideas, anomalies, and experiments that push us towards the next stage in human evolution -- the unbridled conquest of space. Does this term have baggage? You bet -- the kind that every kid on the planet can explain, usually speaking in a loud, excited voice with their eyes half-glazed with anticipation...