# 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:** 4
**Author:** ![Lumpy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lumpy/32/446_2.png) [@Lumpy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lumpy)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 1:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/61 "2025-03-30T01:57:09Z")
I believe the technical term is “stochastic” ---
**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, 2:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/62 "2025-03-30T02:00:04Z")
> [@Andy\_L](#): > > How about the Ham Sandwich [theorem](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_sandwich_theorem) I thought that was a _legal_ concept. > **[The Judge Who Coined “Indict a Ham Sandwich” Was Himself Indicted](https://web.archive.org/web/20230921183424/https://slate.com/human-interest/2014/11/sol-wachtler-the-judge-who-coined-indict-a-ham-sandwich-was-himself-indicted.html)** > > In the aftermath of a grand jury's decision not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, commentators have noted that such an outcome is quite... ---
**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, 2:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/63 "2025-03-30T02:31:09Z")
So far as we can tell, quantum processes really are really and truly random. There are some models which say that they aren’t, but in order to make that work, you have to give up some other things that you’d think would be “obviously true” about the Universe, and you still can’t tell the difference from true randomness. ---
**Author:** ![leahcim](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/b4bc9f/32.png) [@leahcim](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/leahcim)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 2:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/64 "2025-03-30T02:33:30Z")
> [@Lumpy](#): > > Why not just call them “gravity waves”? Because that term [was already taken](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_wave), for phenomena that are a much less apt use of the term. Fun fact: My first job was processing data for a lidar that was trying to (among other things) observe the atmospheric type of gravity waves. > [@Exapno\_Mapcase](#): > > Our galaxy is called the Milky Way. Of course “galaxy” is taken from “milky” in greek, so all galaxies are kind of "milky way"s. My personal favourite poorly-name science thing is a “black body”, which could very well be glowing white hot (like, to a first approximation, the sun). And “black body radiation”, which sounds like “the light emitted by a black thing”. ---
**Author:** ![Exapno\_Mapcase](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/exapno_mapcase/32/1051_2.png) [@Exapno\_Mapcase](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Exapno_Mapcase)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 2:47am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/65 "2025-03-30T02:47:22Z")
> [@leahcim](#): > > Of course “galaxy” is taken from “milky” in greek, so all galaxies are kind of "milky way"s. Of course, and through the Latin _via lactea_. But my point was twofold: that few scientific names have lasted since unscientific origins and that AFAIK, the current scientific term is Milky Way in all countries, not whatever their local traditions produced. If that’s not true I’d be interested to hear it. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 4:03am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/66 "2025-03-30T04:03:26Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > **Big bang:** Not an explosion, and is a continuing process, not an instance of time (usually…I know now it sometimes gets used interchangeably to refer to the t=0 moment) I disagree, firstly I have never heard of any usage of the big bang to mean anything except the t=0 moment, all other times no matter how soon afterwards are always referred to as “X seconds/milliseconds/femtoseconds after the big bang” Also it seems like a rather good analogy to me. It’s not like an explosion on earth, but it’s very analogous to a big explosion in deep space. If someone set off a great big bomb in space and you were a microbe sitting on a small chunk of bomb casing a second after the explosion you’d see a lot of what we see. ---
**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, 4:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/67 "2025-03-30T04:11:30Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > I disagree, firstly I have never heard of any usage of the big bang to mean anything except the t=0 moment, all other times no matter how soon afterwards are always referred to as “X seconds/milliseconds/femtoseconds after the big bang” Cosmologists IME, when they are talking about the big bang they are usually talking about the (ongoing) expansion of the universe from a hotter, denser state. Here’s the wiki for example on the [big bang](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bang). I think the problem is that there isn’t a good term to specifically talk about the t=0 instant (that I am aware of anyway), so they often refer to that as the big bang also. > [@griffin1977](#): > > If someone set off a great big bomb in space and you were a microbe sitting on a small chunk of bomb casing a second after the explosion you’d see a lot of what we see. Not really because there wouldn’t be an outside. Also it would remain as bright and hot as the surface of a star for hundreds of thousands of years. ---
**Author:** ![griffin1977](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/977dab/32.png) [@griffin1977](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/griffin1977)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 4:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/68 "2025-03-30T04:43:11Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > Not really because there wouldn’t be an outside. Neither would there be a for a sufficiently small short-lived microbe in a sufficiently small fragment of bomb. It would just see its own fragment and other small fragments around it expanding in space; and could infer that there must have been an initial “big bang” in the distant (as in, a second ago) past. > [@Mijin](#): > > Cosmologists IME, when they are talking about the big bang they are usually talking about the (ongoing) expansion of the universe from a hotter, denser state. The hotter denser state caused by “The Big Bang”. The current state of the universe is large and expanding, and so if you extrapolate backward there must have been a infinitesimally small universe that suddenly, well, exploded in a, err… Big Bang. The current state of the universe is the product of the big bang, but there is no sudden boundary, except for between the actual literally infinitesimally small big bang and the finitely large universe that followed, a femtosecond, millisecond, or gigayear later. ---
**Author:** ![Tibby](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tibby/32/17030_2.png) [@Tibby](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tibby)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 5:17am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/69 "2025-03-30T05:17:09Z")
Despite its stool-like appearance, I think they should have come up with more refined name than [Turdidae](https://www.britannica.com/animal/Turdidae), for a lovely songbird family. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 5:31am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/70 "2025-03-30T05:31:56Z")
My current least favorite is the Poynting vector. It always brings to mind the concept of “pointing” and makes me wonder why the direction that that vector is pointing is more important than other vectors which are also pointing. Are they not also “pointing vectors?” Even though that is not what it is named after at all. ---
**Author:** ![Wesley\_Clark](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/wesley_clark/32/20581_2.png) [@Wesley\_Clark](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wesley_Clark)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 5:45am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/71 "2025-03-30T05:45:19Z")
Quark naming has always seemed absurd to me. Up/Down and top/bottom I can understand. But charm and strange are kind of silly. ---
**Author:** ![EinsteinsHund](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/einsteinshund/32/8400_2.png) [@EinsteinsHund](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/EinsteinsHund)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 11:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/72 "2025-03-30T11:35:55Z")
> [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > Quark naming has always seemed absurd to me. It’s even sillier in German, where “Quark” originally means “curd cheese”. ---
**Author:** ![Napier](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ce73a5/32.png) [@Napier](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Napier)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 11:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/73 "2025-03-30T11:43:46Z")
I think “greenhouse effect” is a terrible name. It refers to the mechanism of Earth’s temperature rising because of “greenhouse gasses” that are somewhat opaque to infrared radiation trapping thermal energy on Earth. It’s an analogy to greenhouses, whose glass walls and roof are opaque to infrared radiation, making the greenhouse warmer than outside. Trouble is, that’s not the main mechanism by which greenhouses get warm. The eventual replacement of glass with plastics in most greenhouses makes this obvious, as those plastics are pretty transparent to IR. Greenhouses get warm because they trap the air inside. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/74 "2025-03-30T12:10:20Z")
The “Many-Worlds Interpretation” (in quantum mechanics). The name does not tell you anything useful (like what a “world” is in this context, and whether that be a physically meaningful concept), and IMO it is misleading. ---
**Author:** ![DPRK](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/4491bb/32.png) [@DPRK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/DPRK)\ **Post date:** [March 30, 2025, 12:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/75 "2025-03-30T12:14:18Z")
> [@EinsteinsHund](#): > > > [@Wesley\_Clark](#): > > > > Quark naming has always seemed absurd to me. > > It’s even sillier in German, where “Quark” originally means “curd cheese”. The myth is that the word was lifted from James Joyce, with all that implies. (And, yes, Joyce did know German.) ---
**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 30, 2025, 12:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/76 "2025-03-30T12:36:30Z")
> [@Napier](#): > > I think “greenhouse effect” is a terrible name. It refers to the mechanism of Earth’s temperature rising because of “greenhouse gasses” that are somewhat opaque to infrared radiation trapping thermal energy on Earth. It’s an analogy to greenhouses … It’s indeed technically a terrible term, but it’s a good enough approximation to convey to the general public the broad concept of what “greenhouse gases” do. You actually have to delve a little deeper into the mechanics of radiative transfer to understand that “thermal trapping” isn’t really what happens. Greenhouses work by trapping convective heat transfer. Of course lots of convection happens in the atmosphere, too, but the process by which so-called “GHG” gases work is that they absorb and then re-emit certain frequencies in the IR spectrum that are radiated from the earth’s surface and that would normally escape into space. The atmosphere is relatively transparent to most incoming solar radiation but less so to the outgoing lower-frequency IR, and increasingly less so the more GHGs accumulate, particularly CO2, and also CH4. But CO2 is the most persistent, long-lived GHG. ---
**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, 12:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/77 "2025-03-30T12:39:19Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > Neither would there be a for a sufficiently small short-lived microbe in a sufficiently small fragment of bomb. …an experience we can all relate to. > [@griffin1977](#): > > The current state of the universe is large and expanding, and so if you extrapolate backward there must have been a infinitesimally small universe that suddenly, well, exploded in a, err… Big Bang. The current state of the universe is the product of the big bang, but there is no sudden boundary, except for between the actual literally infinitesimally small big bang and the finitely large universe that followed, a femtosecond, millisecond, or gigayear later. It didn’t explode. You’re illustrating why it’s a bad name. ---
**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, 12:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/78 "2025-03-30T12:46:05Z")
Calling it the Big Whoosh just doesn’t have quite the same pizazz though. ---
**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 30, 2025, 1:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/79 "2025-03-30T13:01:53Z")
> [@Mijin](#): > > It didn’t explode. You’re illustrating why it’s a bad name. The BIg Bang, as already noted, was an intentionally facetious name coined by a proponent of the steady-state theory. It not only was not an “explosion”, it was something that completely defies an intuitive description. It not only created – and continues to create – space and time, but it also created matter. Matter as we know it didn’t come into existence until well after the Big Bang – depending on your definition, as early as the Quark Epoch at about 10-6 seconds later, to the Recombination Epoch about 300,000 years later when the first hydrogen and helium atoms formed from their ionized state. ---
**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, 1:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316/80 "2025-03-30T13:10:37Z")
> [@wolfpup](#): > > The BIg Bang, as already noted, was an intentionally facetious name coined by a proponent of the steady-state theory. By Fred Hoyle, though, despite being a steady-state proponent himself, he maintains the name was never meant to be mocking / belittling. …though he probably would say that, given that he lived to see the big bang be confirmed beyond reasonable doubt and this name sticking. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/worst-named-scientific-concepts/1016316.md?page=5)