• drail@fedia.io
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    9 months ago

    Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan’s Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn’t even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.

    Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.

    Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped “clean up” the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.

    Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name “neutron” by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed “neutrino” or little neutron (they didn’t know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.

    1. Neutrino
    2. Neutretto/neutronetto
    3. Neutrello/neutronello

    Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.

    1. Neutroni
    2. Neutrachione/neutronachione
    3. Neutrozzo/neutronozzo

    But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they’ve done.

    Don’t even get me started on the J/Psi debacle…

    • crapwittyname@lemm.ee
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      9 months ago

      The time derivative of position is velocity. The derivative of velocity is acceleration. Derive again and you get jerk. Then it’s snap, crackle and pop.

      (For those too young, these are the names of those characters they use to sell Rice Krispies)

    • mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
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      9 months ago

      Chromodynamics just uses colors, but makes up for that simplicity by introducing anti-colors.

      Neutrello

      That sounds delicious.

      • drail@fedia.io
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        9 months ago

        Neutrello sounds good, but it is actually pretty…

        weak

        Rimshot, crowd moans

    • criitz@reddthat.com
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      9 months ago

      TIL I’ve pronounced quark wrong my whole life (rhyming with park).

      Though I’ve heard it done that way elsewhere - perhaps it is also considered acceptable at this point.

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      Wait, how is “quark” supposed to be pronounced? Not like the Star Trek character or the German cheese?

    • OccamsTeapot@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      My favourite is the barn. Hmm what should we call this 10^-28 m^2 cross sectional area? Ten times less than a billionth of a billionth of a billionth of a square metre. Hur hurr wow it’s so BIG it’s like hitting a barn door, let’s call it a barn.

    • littleblue✨@lemmy.world
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      9 months ago

      So… It seems that you feel let down by your predecessors in physics’ inability to tell the future… Hunh. Odd, that.