I believe the technical term is “stochastic”
I thought that was a legal concept.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Despite its stool-like appearance, I think they should have come up with more refined name than Turdidae, for a lovely songbird family.
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.
Quark naming has always seemed absurd to me.
Up/Down and top/bottom I can understand. But charm and strange are kind of silly.
It’s even sillier in German, where “Quark” originally means “curd cheese”.
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.
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.
The myth is that the word was lifted from James Joyce, with all that implies. (And, yes, Joyce did know German.)
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.
…an experience we can all relate to.
It didn’t explode. You’re illustrating why it’s a bad name.
Calling it the Big Whoosh just doesn’t have quite the same pizazz though.
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.
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.