WIMPs—Weakly Interacting Massive Particles—are a hypothetical class of particles scientists think may explain dark matter. Sure, they don’t shine, they don’t absorb light, and they hardly ever bump into normal matter, which does make them seem a little… well, wimpy. On the other hand, when two WIMPs do manage to collide, they annihilate in a burst of gamma rays. That’s not so wimpy—that’s badass!
You’re correct. The title of Freud’s work was “Das Ich und das Es” and I transposed them somehow. Sorry.
The basic ideas of algebra:
1: You’ve got some things.
2: You can do things to them.
3: You can do nothing, if you want.
4: You can combine the things you do, by doing one thing and then another.
5: You can (usually, at least) undo the things you do.
The things can be numbers, and the things you can do can be addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. In that case, what you get is what’s taught as “algebra” in high school. But the things could also be shapes, for instance, and the things you do to them could be things like rotations. Or a Rubik’s Cube, and the things you can do to it are twisting the faces. Or messages, that you can encode or decode. Or all sorts of other things.
I like WIMPs and MACHOs. What I cannot abide are the names that are deliberately misleading and designed to make headlines. “The God Particle” has been mentioned, but I would also include “Quantum Teleportation” and “Invisibility Cloak.”
My college algebra class was called “Abstract Algebra” which sounds good. From the standpoint of a mathematician, I could easily imagine it being called “Elementary Algebra,” even though it is a hard class for a sophomore. The hardest math class I ever took was called “Introduction to Real Analysis”. It was a rigorous development of the real numbers and calculus for mathematics majors. I took it after one year of calculus in high school and one year in college. The name made it sound like remedial math for the bottom half of the class.
The “God Particle” is an interesting case - because it’s a euphemism. Leo Lederman says he wanted to call it “The God-damned Particle” (because it was annoyingly difficult and expensive to find), but his publisher wouldn’t let him
This, and your post in the Pit about a certain poster languishing for three days in a vat of Hellmann’s mayo, motivates me to nominate you the SDMB Resident Wordsmith.
What if it was in a little tiny submarine injected into the blood stream?
That would be fantastic.
Bon Voyage!
If that’s a paying job title—sign me up!
Fermi Bubbles — enormous lobes of gamma rays spewing from the center of our galaxy… sounds like something your stomach does after eating gas station sushi long past its expiration date. Excuse me, I’m afraid I’ve got a bad case of the Fermi bubbles again.
The thing is (in my own incomplete understanding), is that one of the simpler math equations that demonstrates ‘chaotic behavior’ does indeed plot out to something that looks sort of like a butterfly.
Are you talking about the Mandelbrot set as in Mandelbrot set - Wikipedia ?
Or are you talking about the butterfly curve as in Butterfly curve (transcendental) - Wikipedia ?
A Strange Atttractor, maybe one like this one:
Jeez I love this thread!
I nominate both Dark Energy and Dark Matter. As we do not know if they are matter, energy, or dark in any meaningful sense of the term.
Dark Matter is pretty certain to be matter, since it gravitates but does not disperse as some form of energy would. Also, both are dark in the meaning of “unknown”.
Yeah, but what should we call dark energy and dark matter? An accurate name for either of them would be long and messy. The same is true of many of the terms in this thread. When you find a new scientific thing/event/process/object/location/concept/time/place/theory/whatever, you need to find a name for them. Generally, this means you have to use a word or phrase that already exists which you think makes a good analogy for it. Once you choose the word or phrase, you have to then work out an explanation of what it means that takes about a page to write down. You will know that this still isn’t a very good explanation, but you also know that it would take a book to do a thorough explanation. That’s just how new discoveries work.
Has anyone mentioned kilowatt-hours yet? Didn’t see it in a topic search.
It’s one of the most common scientific units people come across (used for electricity bills, batteries, energy consumption, etc.) and yet it’s incredibly counter-intuitive. People usually confuse it with “kilowatts per hour” or kilowatts/watts in general.
Whereas water is measured using liters or cubic meters for volume and liters per second (or similar) for flow rate, watt and watt-hours invert that logic and make it super confusing.
A watt is already a rate (a joule per second) and a watt-hour is a measure of “quantity”, convertible to calories or therms or barrels of oil equivalent. You’d normally never use a unit like “watts per hour” because that would mean “joules per second per hour”.
Silly all around and makes for confusing phrasing like “kilowatt-hours per month”.
Also kWh is a bastard unit in another way: “hours” is not a metric unit. It’s like measuring area in centimeter-inches
It’s one of those “non SI units accepted for use with the SI”, though, right alongside the litre, A.U., dB, etc.
And don’t give them any ideas, lest it become the kilowatt-3.6*10^3s…
Wish we had some simple everyday energy unit that people can easily relate to. A calorie is tiny, a kcal is still small, and in general people don’t do well converting between cookies and batteries anyway…
Maybe we need a new unit. Tesla’s already taken. Elons? Bunnies? AA equivalent? Facebook-hour? Pit-minute?