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Comment by leroy-is-here | Hacker News Reader

I don’t understand the why anymore. More than 2000 years ago, we understood that we must be a sum of parts and that kind of idea yielded the atom. We applied the atom to many kinds of structures to discern their nature. Now, atom means some scientific particle.

We simply have more things to name, but still constantly run into things we cannot name yet. We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?

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> still constantly run into things we cannot name yet.

Humanity has the opposite problem - we invent names for things that don't exist. We have no idea what dark matter is, but we have a name handy just in case. Same with gods, elves, dragons, aliens, etc.

I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist. Worst case just name it "phenomenon X" where X is the first unused integer.

I can find lots of examples of people naming things that don't exist. See phlogiston and ether for example, if you don't like fantasy and religion.

I think we have both problems, actually. We definitely have names that are good, like New York, Justice, Earth, Peace, Aphex Twin’s Windowlicker.

But we also have names of things which are bad, because they are false. These the are names which are you talking about.

> I can't find one example of people not being able to name something that exist

How about "The smallest positive integer not definable in under sixty letters"?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berry_paradox

> We think this will end but it will not. If our universe is ever expanding, how can it?

Heat death of the universe?

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