# Worst named scientific concepts **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [March 29, 2025, 7:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316 "2025-03-29T19:00:05Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![wolfpup](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wolfpup/32/10618_2.png) [@wolfpup](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/wolfpup)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 10:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/41 "2025-03-29T22:39:59Z")
> [@dougrb](#): > > > [@wolfpup](#): > > > > Fundamentally and by definition, it cannot possibly convey any information about anything inside the black hole. > > I’m currently reading this book by Thomas Hertog, who worked with Hawking up until his death. Hawking originally thought information was lost but ended up changing his mind. I can’t even begin to summarize the reason but it has to due with quantum entanglement and “holograms”. One thing I do tend to side with Hawking on is “No Multiverses”. Sorry Brian Greene. That’s another book I’m reading now. > > [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On\_the\_Origin\_of\_Time](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Time) I guess I should modify my simplistic claim, which reflects generally accepted traditional beliefs about total information loss in a black hole. Those interested in reading more can refer to this discussion of the **[black hole information paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hole_information_paradox)**, although frankly it makes my head hurt. Briefly, there’s hypothetically (and very controversially) something called the Page curve governing black hole evaporation as a consequence of Hawking radiation, which suggests that at about the halfway point of such black hole evaporation (which for realistic black holes would be on the order of trillions of years) the Hawking radiation starts to become increasingly correlated with the putative information content inside the black hole. FWIW, this strikes me as being more math than physics, forever untestable, eternally elusive and immune to any actual evidence. ---
**Author:** ![nearwildheaven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/90db22/32.png) [@nearwildheaven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nearwildheaven)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/42 "2025-03-29T22:46:02Z")
AKA the Higgs boson, which I personally think is a better name for it. A dipole moment is not a measure of time. ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/43 "2025-03-29T22:50:37Z")
“Moment”, in physics, is a lot broader concept than “dipole moment” specifically, and it’s consistent in its meaning across many different concepts. It’s not particularly related to the “short time” meaning, though I’m not actually sure which came first. ---
**Author:** ![Alessan](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/alessan/32/465_2.png) [@Alessan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alessan)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/44 "2025-03-29T22:54:04Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > AKA the Higgs boson, which I personally think is a better name for it. “Higgs Boson” always makes me think of a character from a Patrick O’Brien novel. ---
**Author:** ![Plutonium\_Chef](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/plutonium_chef/32/11211_2.png) [@Plutonium\_Chef](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Plutonium_Chef)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/45 "2025-03-29T23:12:38Z")
“Helium” was discovered (spectroscopically) in the Sun, and named for the Greek sun god Helios; the “-ium” ending means ‘thing’ or ‘stuff’. So far, so good. Then they discovered other noble gas elements, and gave them all names that end in “-on”, also meaning ‘thing’. They should’ve named the heavier noble gases “-ium”, to match the first one, or gone back and changed helium to match the emerging convention. ---
**Author:** ![Andy\_L](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c67d28/32.png) [@Andy\_L](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Andy_L)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/46 "2025-03-29T23:18:01Z")
How about the Ham Sandwich [theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem) ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/47 "2025-03-29T23:24:49Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Most likely of course the scientist’s argument was based more around our moon being relatively large, as satellites go, compared to the body it orbits. The reasoning I heard is that the force from the sun’s gravity on the moon is greater than that of the Earth and thus the moon’s orbit is never concave wrt the sun. But I think this is just rationalisation, and the real reason is that the moon is large compared to the body it orbits. > [@Mijin](#): > > Best would have been adopting the Chinese or Japanese names, which are either “Silver River” or “River of Heaven”. Okay, those are cool names. But every language can have its own name, so ‘Eurocentricity’ hardly seems like a reasonable criticism. Worst named scientific concepts: ‘cold-blooded’ - not actually cold, means their body temperature depends on the environment rather than being internally controlled. ‘survival of the fittest’ - makes it sound like being fit and strong is what matters for evolution, rather than whatever animal is best adapted. ‘organic chemistry’ - probably the fault of marketers, but it sounds like it’s related to organic food, and that’s a whole other kettle of worms. ‘quantum leap’ - sounds like a big change, rather than just a discontinuous one. ---
**Author:** ![dougrb](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/76d3ee/32.png) [@dougrb](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dougrb)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:26pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/48 "2025-03-29T23:26:21Z")
> [@nearwildheaven](#): > > AKA the Higgs boson I alway thought it should be higgs bosom. bosom, verb “to enclose in or as if in an embrace” ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:28pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/49 "2025-03-29T23:28:56Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > ‘organic chemistry’ - probably the fault of marketers, but it sounds like it’s related to organic food, and that’s a whole other kettle of worms. > > ‘quantum leap’ - sounds like a big change, rather than just a discontinuous one. Both of these are perfectly good names that subsequently got abused by people who had no clue what they were talking about. Blame the clueless people, not the scientists. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2025, 11:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/50 "2025-03-29T23:44:16Z")
> [@DemonTree](#): > > 'survival of the fittest’ - makes it sound like being fit and strong is what matters for evolution, rather than whatever animal is best adapted. I prefer “survival of the fecundest”. ---
**Author:** ![Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/q.q.switcheroo/32/5713_2.png) [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Q.Q.Switcheroo)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/51 "2025-03-30T00:00:54Z")
“Butterfly effect” - does it mean “a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane halfway across the world,” or “someone steps on a butterfly and alters the course of history à la ‘A Sound of Thunder’”? Who knows? Who cares? Call it something else! ---
**Author:** ![markn\_1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/f9ae1b/32.png) [@markn\_1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/markn_1)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/52 "2025-03-30T00:05:04Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > It’s not particularly related to the “short time” meaning, though I’m not actually sure which came first. According to the OED, we have: (1) “Any of various functions describing torsional effects, generally having the form of the product of a force and a distance; spec. the turning effect produced by a force.” – first quotation from 1830 (2) “The distance between the two poles of a simple bar magnet, or the two charges of an electric dipole, multiplied by the strength of either pole, as a measure of the turning effect produced by an applied magnetic or electric field, respectively.” – first quotation from 1865 However the more common “short time” meaning is much older: (3) “A very short period or extent of time, esp. one too brief for its duration to be significant; a point in time, an instant.” – first quotation from 1382 (4) “A period of time (not necessarily brief) marked by a particular quality of experience or by a memorable event.” – first quotation also from 1382 ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/53 "2025-03-30T00:23:27Z")
> [@Q.Q.Switcheroo](#): > > “Butterfly effect” - does it mean “a butterfly flaps its wings and causes a hurricane halfway across the world,” or “someone steps on a butterfly and alters the course of history à la ‘A Sound of Thunder’”? Kind of the latter but it is indeed popularly taken to mean either: 1. The energy of the butterly flapping its wings grows into a hurricane 2. _This_ butterfly might be special in some way, and lead to an improbable set of events, but most small things don’t affect anything …neither of which is true. (Or at least the second totally misses the point but might happen to be (unknowably) true for a given time boundary) In fact “chaos theory” in general is misleading. AIUI, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it only makes sense to talk about chaotic behaviour in _deterministic_ systems. So it is not really random in the way people imagine. I can’t think of a better name for it, maybe it’s one of those where just taking someone’s surname would have been better. ---
**Author:** ![DemonTree](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/demontree/32/8646_2.png) [@DemonTree](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DemonTree)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/54 "2025-03-30T00:30:27Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > I can’t think of a better name for it, maybe it’s one of those where just taking someone’s surname would have been better. Divergence theory? ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:46am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/55 "2025-03-30T00:46:09Z")
But chaos doesn’t necessarily diverge. In fact it usially doesn’t. It’s predictable, but only loosely predictable. Folks raised on strict cause and effect and rigid clockwork universe thinking really struggle with loose determinism. See this for more > **[Attractor](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attractor)** > > In the mathematical field of dynamical systems, an attractor is a set of states toward which a system tends to evolve, for a wide variety of starting conditions of the system. System values that get close enough to the attractor values remain close even if slightly disturbed. > In finite-dimensional systems, the evolving variable may be represented algebraically as an n-dimensional vector. The attractor is a region in n-dimensional space. In physical systems, the n dimensions may be, for example... ---
**Author:** ![Chronos](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chronos/32/134_2.png) [@Chronos](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chronos)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/56 "2025-03-30T00:57:55Z")
Determinism means that if you had perfect information, you could make perfect predictions. This remains true in chaos theory. What determinism does not mean is that with almost-perfect information, you could make almost-perfect predictions. This is where chaos theory comes in. In a chaotic system, after some amount of time (probably shorter than you’d think), even almost-perfect information helps you almost not at all in making predictions. Where the proverbial butterfly comes in is that even a deviation as slight as not accounting for the flapping of a single butterfly’s wings might be enough that you can’t make any meaningful predictions. ---
**Author:** ![LSLGuy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lslguy/32/5813_2.png) [@LSLGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/LSLGuy)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 1:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/57 "2025-03-30T01:07:05Z")
> [@Chronos](#): > > What determinism does not mean is that with almost-perfect information, you could make almost-perfect predictions. 'Zactly. Pre chaos, the assumption was you could. Chaos shows you can’t. But that doesn’t correspond to the conventional colloquial meaning of “chaos” as utterly unpredictable Calvinball where literally _anything_ might happen. The frontier of tight predictability collapses very, very soon. As you rightly say. The point of attractors is the general possibility space remains probabilistically bounded even as specific trajectories through it remain incomputable. Weather is unpredictable past a few days. But surface temps being below 150F remain fully absolutely positively completely predictable nonetheless. At least in 2025. Ask me a liitle later about the year 2225. 😉 ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 1:15am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/58 "2025-03-30T01:15:12Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > In fact “chaos theory” in general is misleading. AIUI, someone can correct me if I’m wrong, but I think it only makes sense to talk about chaotic behaviour in _deterministic_ systems. So it is not really random in the way people imagine. Well, yes, but things that we think of as random aren’t “really random” either. If I try to roll a pair of dice in the same way twice, they’ll probably come up different, not because the dice rolls aren’t subject to deterministic laws, but because they’re so sensitive to small changes in the initial conditions of the roll—which is a key feature of chaos theory. ---
**Author:** ![Mijin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mijin/32/9369_2.png) [@Mijin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mijin)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 1:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/59 "2025-03-30T01:22:16Z")
Sure, but I was just saying that “chaotic” behaviour is about deterministic systems. Whether our universe includes actual random events is debatable. As I tentatively understand it, events like the timing of an unstable nucleus releasing an alpha particle are necessarily unpredictable, and not for the reason that chaotic systems are unpredictable, so meet at least some of the definitions of random. …and I’ll leave it there because probably I’ve already gone wrong. ---
**Author:** ![John\_DiFool](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/john_difool/32/19543_2.png) [@John\_DiFool](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/John_DiFool)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 1:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/60 "2025-03-30T01:45:40Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > How about the Ham Sandwich [theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem) No, Cass Eliot didn’t choke on one. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316.md?page=4)