Yes! Strange and charm are awesome names. Truth and beauty are also great. Up and down should have been named ultra and dazzle.
Speaking of particles, the “color” terminology for quarks, with the “red”, “green” and “blue” names is unfortunate. It has nothing to do with actual colors, and to make it worse, actual colors are somewhat related to the behavior of subatomic particles (but electrons, not quarks). So every introductory description of quarks has to spend several sentences explaining that quark colors are not related to everyday colors.
And our sun is called “the Sun”, and our moon is called “the Moon”. Not very imaginative. Like getting a dog and naming it “the Dog”.
I’m just glad that the quarks have cooperated such that we have cool-sounding concepts like “strange stars” and “strange matter” and not “bottom stars” and “bottom matter”.
Actually it’s not arbitrary; it does work as an analogy on some levels. It’s a lot “easier” to explain the strong force in an RGB analogy, where every assembly of quarks needs to remain color neutral (white). (Easier obviously in inverted commas because chromodynamics is apparently the thing that gives mathematicians headaches, and my own level of understanding is such that I could nod along to a PBS space time video but would not be comfortable making any inferences or extrapolations whatsoever)
It’s similar with quantum spin. The first thing you’re told about it is: spin doesn’t actually mean spinning. But then in lots of practical situations, such as breaking down how MRI works, the analogy of literal spinning is taken pretty far and turns out to be very useful.
Atom comes from the Greek for uncuttable. Ernest Rutherford would like a word.
I should have known that speaking imprecisely would bring the pedants out of the woodwork. It’s among the things I like about the Dope.
You are correct of course, but in the common vernacular, there’s numbers, and numbers with a non-zero complex term.
Algebra is not self-consistent without allowing for numbers that include a term that includes the square root of negative one. Therefor, rather than speak of imaginary numbers, I would prefer “numbers” and “real numbers.”
Of course my preferences don’t matter a hill of beans in this crazy world.
I’ve also seen such numbers referred to as “purely imaginary numbers”, with “imaginary numbers” meaning numbers that have a nonzero imaginary part. That part of the terminology isn’t always consistent. But usually, if you’re dealing with imaginary numbers at all, what’s relevant is all of the complex numbers, anyway, and everyone agrees what “complex numbers” refers to.
Eh, given how much other explanation is needed for quarks, a couple of plain-English sentences saying that the colors aren’t actually colors is a drop in the bucket.
I think folks usually take that caveat too far. It’s not entirely like the rotation of an extended rigid object, but it is a sort of angular momentum a particle can have while continuing to have no linear momentum.
The “Central Dogma of Biology” is poorly named, as admited by the man who coined the term.
“My mind was, that a dogma was an idea for which there was no reasonable evidence. You see?!” And Crick gave a roar of delight. “I just didn’t know what dogma meant. And I could just as well have called it the ‘Central Hypothesis,’ or — you know. Which is what I meant to say. Dogma was just a catch phrase.”
Calling it a “dogma” was not only inaccurate, but it caused many people to treat it as a dogma. I recall how some people originally argued that prions were impossible because “they violated the Central Dogma of Biology”, a very unscientific and literally dogmatic position to take.
In 2002, the chemists decided that all metals should end with -ium. In fact, that was proposed in 1953, but by then, I don’t think any metal elements had not been named thus for about 100 years. But they didn’t go back and rename any established elements, so it was just for future naming.
My contribution to the thread is galactic halo. A halo is a circle or ring around or above a saint’s head. Galaxies don’t have heads, so this name is confusing.
Going just by the name " The fundamental theorem of arithmetic." could you guess what this is about? Something about a property of addition or some such. I mean, after all, it says “fundamental” right there so it has to be pretty basic.
It is actually the unique prime factorization theorem of integers in Number Theory.
So apparently “fundamental” means "really important and the “arithmetic” is thrown in there for fun.
One term in CS that bugs me is “LZW” compression. For Lempel, Ziv and Welch. It’s the system used in gif files, the old Unix compress command and the backbone of original .zip and .rar compression systems.
Ziv and Lempel (note order) wrote a couple papers on doing compression using a table of strings with their shorter codes. Kind of vague and requires two passes to do a compression. The compression table has to also be added to the file. It can be a problem for compressing a file on the fly for transmission.
Welch came along and figured out a way to build the compression table on the fly in only one pass. Remarkably, the compression table did not have to be part of the file. The decompression algorithm would also build the table on the fly. This is one of the most amazing results I’ve ever seen in CS.
Anyway, technically it should be WZL compression although just “Welch’s” would be fine.
I think “halo” was used for “glowing ring around astronomical body” before there were saints.
Yeah. “The glowing circular thing around the smaller glowing circular thing” is all the deep that gets.
Back in an era when art had not yet invented perspective and suggested 3D, so that 2D circles implied 3D spheres.
1560s, “ring of light around the sun or moon,” from Latin halo (nominative halos), from Greek halos “disk of the sun or moon; ring of light around the sun or moon” (also “disk of a shield”); "“threshing floor; garden,” of unknown origin. The sense “threshing floor” (on which oxen trod out a circular path) probably is the original in Greek. The development to “disk” and then to “halo” would be via roundness. Sense of “light around the head of a holy person or deity” first recorded 1640s. As a verb from 1791 (implied in Haloed).
Thank you.
The word “arithmetic” used to be used for what we now call number theory.
And then there’s what one of my college math profs said:
“You probably think that the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra is a theorem of algebra. Wrong.”
I had a sophomore math class called something like Elementary Algebra.
Like the Holy Roman Empire it was neither elementary nor anything I recognized as algebra.
And I think the wren deserves a better scientific name than “cavemen cavemen.”
Sophomore in college or high school? I would think that “Elementary Algebra” would indeed be the thing that is taught in high school. Are you sure it wasn’t Abstract Algebra? That is a more advanced topic suitable for a college class.
But galactic halos are not a ring around a galaxy.
My offhand impression is that the course is inconsistently named depending on the college. Sometimes it’s called Abstract Algebra, sometimes it’s called Modern Algebra, and sometimes it’s called just Algebra. You need to ask what the course is about to be sure. Sometimes it’s just the algebra most people learn in high school. Sometimes it’s the stuff you learn in college about groups, rings, fields, and such.