Sometimes Twitter is used to "publish" long form works that one would not expect to find in a venue that only allows the use of 140 characters at once.

The quote is likening On The Road to a collection of minutia, which is typically identified as the only thing available on Twitter.

Just a matter of semantics: Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation is a law. Einsteins General Theory of Relativity (ie. gravity) is a theory that's damn near a law. The difference here being Newton was concerned with exactly the math and nothing else Einstein not so much which is encapsulated in the difference between gravit-ation and gravit-y. Newton's Laws of Motion (ie Classical Mechanics) are also laws as are the Laws of Thermodynamics because they're all purely mathematical. Statistical Mechanics, Electromagnetics, Quantum Mechanics, Solid State Physics, the Standard Model, etc are all theories that have been proven to a stupidly high degree. You can tell the difference by how they are thought. Although if you lean Quantum Mechanics via the Matrix approach you end up with mathematical laws that give equivalent answers to the theory.

Yeah, it's basically joining in the long line of critical attacks on Keroac. It's tacky and possibly one of the worst attacks on him ever but I laughed.

The thing is that no matter how much you prove a theory it CANNOT become a law. Laws are collections of evidence. That is all.
Theories are explanatory.
The law of universal gravitation is different from the theory of gravity but they unfortunately have the same name. The gravitation law is the the mathematics behind the attraction but does not explain why this occurs, which the theory does.
It is wrong to say a theory is nearly a law. It is also misleading because it muddles the waters between what is a theory and what is a law.
No matter how well proven your theory is, it is still as far from becoming a law as when you started.

Please do not attempt to explain to me things I know you know that I already know. Its insulting and annoying especially when its completely irrelevant to what I said.

No they don't. There is no Newtonian theory of gravity. Such a thing does not exist. Newton is actually quoted as saying something to the effect that any explanation of the source of gravity is up to god. That is to say he approached it from a purely mathematical stand point and left it there. With the caveat that he did say his math worked best if gravity was the same everywhere and instantaneous. Neither of which are explanations just limitations on the mathematics. I have no idea where you are getting this law of gravity except perhaps as a mistranslation.

Again only the law of gravitation exists. There is no such thing as either the theory or law of gravitation. There is the theory of general relativity which is sometimes called the theory of gravity. However, there is no accepted law or theory from Newton's day that deals with gravity, only gravitation. There certainly isn't two forms of the law of gravitation one dealing with the math and the other theory. Further, once again please avoid explaining things to me that both clearly need no explanation and which I have not brought into question to begin with. (ie. I clearly delineated the exact same relationship between theory and law as you did and yet you felt the need to explain it like I was wrong which is highly annoying)

We'll have to disagree there but probably because I'm using law as having two different meanings which is confusing. When I say a theory is almost a law I mean a theory is almost as metaphysically certain as a law. A condition which I theory can approach asymptotically but never actually reach.

Perhaps but everyone inside the scientific community does it when discussing things with people outside the community because its easier than trying to explain the subtleties of meaning given to the term theory. It serves as a quick and easy way to distinguish a theory that isn't likely to ever change from something more fluid like super-gravity or string theory.

Again I was not implying you could change a theory about why into a mathematical law through evidence. Though the two approaches can give equivalent results and as such there are methods to translate from one to the other. I was implying that certain theories have advanced to the point of nearly the same metaphysical certainty as mathematical laws like 1+1 = 2.

When you say a theory is close to becoming a law it seems like you don't at all know what you are talking about because they are completely different. I apologise if my tone offended you, which I did not intend, but your post, which claimed to be pedantic, seemed muddled.

I'm not talking about Newton, I'm talking about our theory of gravity, how we understand (or don't) gravity to work.
If you're going to complain about me misinterpreting your posts about things you know, I going to complain about you misinterpreting my posts about things I know as I'm very much more a historian of science than a scientist and part of my thesis was on British science.
I was talking about our "theory" of gravity as a subset of relativity not Newton's though I probably didn't make that clear as gravity is really a subset of a larger theory.

While I accept that as a valid standpoint I'm going to have to strongly disagree as my own position is completely opposite.


Fair enough. I'm too used to my own group of geeks and nerds who know all the terms.
Yeah I think this is more a philosophic difference than a semantic one as I don't hold that theories can approach that but I can see how you could.
I didn't mean to offend you but I geniunely misinterpretated your post.

Ah, I understand now.

This is why I keep academia at arms length. Sometimes shit is just too smugly pretentious.

Science is barely even academia.
Wait till you hit the arts where the entire discipline is founded on being so smug and pretentious that nobody can work out what a load of shit you are talking.

I was referring to the twittreature thing, your little tiff over scientific jargon semantics wasn't too bad. Like I bet college kids are just apeshit over new buzzwords like that. Ugh

I'd like to chime in that I'm in college and buzzwords burn me like some kind of unholy fire.

Twitterature isn't a buzzword, it's a title of a single book where they shortened a lot of classics into twitter form. I haven't read it and it's been panned by everyone but that quote came out which is funny.
But that is the only place I've seen the term.
Academia hates Kerouac like the fucking plague though. I guess you can consider Kerouac a buzzword for suck.
Aside from that I don't think there are real buzzwords in academia, at least any fields I'm in. We tend to discourage them because it suppresses debate. The most buzzwordy things get is actualyl when the media reports academic work to everyone else and uses buzzwords to simplify concepts for those outside the field. So it's kind of the opposite really, I find media and thus general populace by association far more buzzword inclined.