See, I don’t think so. I think it will turn out to be a chimera of the order of phlogiston.
Well, something is doing the gravitational lensing of distant quasars to produce Einstein Crosses and Einstein Rings. AIUI, there’s not enough baryonic matter in the foreground galaxies to do this. So this “phlogiston” is certainly acting like it’s there.
Ringo: “I’ve got a Black Hole in me pocket.”
Ben Franklin was a brilliant polymath and a proud card-carrying member of the Age of Enlightenment. He left scorch marks on nearly every field he touched — publishing mogul, civic pioneer, champion of education, savvy politician and diplomat, relentless inventor, and cutting-edge scientist (back when they called them “natural philosophers” and wore fancy waistcoats). America wouldn’t be America if not for Franklin (you decide if that’s a good thing).
In the world of science, Franklin was basically the colonial Bill Nye — dragging the study of electricity out of the parlor and into the lab. Until Franklin came along, electricity was mostly for party tricks and shocking unsuspecting friends (I gotta admit, I’d be one of those doing the shocking). He made it serious, and seriously fascinating.
Ben didn’t invent electricity — that was Mother Nature’s gig. Franklin wasn’t colonial Electro-Magneto Man (though now that you mention it, I’d read that comic). And no, he didn’t discover it either — the ancient Greeks were already rubbing amber and collecting static before ol’ Ben ever picked up a kite string.
What Franklin did do was prove that lightning is a form of electricity, and then had the gall to tame it with his invention of the lightning rod — a genius device that saved lives and property.
As for the famous kite experiment? It may be partly apocryphal. Some historians suggest it was actually his son William who flew the kite, not Ben. Smart move, really. If you’re going to fly a metal key into a thunderstorm, better to use a relative you can spare. And Franklin wasn’t terribly fond of William anyway — he liked his grandson Benjamin Franklin Bache a whole lot more (probably because Bache wasn’t a British loyalist, and also hadn’t tried to kill him via atmospheric electricity).
After all, nobody wants one of our nation’s founding fathers remembered as BBQ Ben.
Franklin also gave us several foundational terms in electricity — positive, negative, charge, conductor, and insulator — which were way more appropriate than his choice of “battery.”
The term “battery” originally referred to a battery of cannons — a group of weapons working together to kill and destroy. Franklin used it to describe multiple Leyden jars (early capacitors) linked together. This made sense… at the time.
But today, we know a battery refers to a single device that stores and delivers power through electrochemical reactions, not a group of jars or anything else. Calling one AA battery a “battery” is like calling a single trombone a “brass band.”
Franklin was a genius, no doubt (and my favorite forefather by far)— but if he’d gone with something like “Voltpack” or “Joule Box” instead of “Battery”, we might’ve saved ourselves a bit of confusion… and a syllable.
Just call it a cell if that is what you mean… I don’t think any confusion can be blamed on Franklin or Volta or any of those guys.
Of course not. As I said, it was an appropriate term to use in Franklin’s day. It’s our fault for adopting it later on when we knew better. Franklin was a genius, but he wasn’t prescient.
Agreed.
Growing up in the UK, the term “cell” was common enough for pedants to occasionally correct people on “AA battery” but that’s basically over now. I think it’s because the distinction between cell and battery is not always obvious to the consumer (a power source with single negative and positive terminal may nonetheless have multiple cells inside) and is not something we need to know anyway.
It might have been slightly better if “cell / cells” had caught on, rather than “battery / batteries” but at least there’s no confusion because everyone understands battery to be a singular pluggable object. (In everyday life anyway, IANA electrical engineer)
When I was recently teaching a friend chess, she asked why the concept of a “battery” (two or more pieces in a line attacking the same square) was named such. Because, I think, the meaning as singular power device is much more common than the broader meaning of battery now.
That’s the one. Sorry, I should have looked it up myself.
Leave it to the Brits to take something already confusing and make it even more confusing 
. The word “cell” already has more meanings than a Shakespearean insult: Sacks of gooey organic materials that make up your body, small telecommunication devices you drop in the toilet, cramped rooms for folks like Bill Cosby. And now… power sources!?! “Let’s put a cell in that cell and lock it up with the prisoner in the cell!” The Queen would be proud. (Okay, was proud.)
Juice Brick, Watt Nugget, Power Loaf, Zzzap Sack, or Lightning Biscuit are all better choices than “Cell.”
Don’t let me make it sound more confusing than it is!
Everyone just says battery / batteries now. I was just giving a bit of history. 
Aww, I was just pulling your leg. Or, as you English folks say, “I was pissing on you.” Or, something like that. 
Your friend would be very confused by the lyrics to “76 Trombones”: “… there were 50 mounted cannon in the battery …”
Parasol ganglion cells in your retina are sometimes called M cells, because they project to the magnocellular layers in your lateral geniculate nucleus.
Midget ganglion cells are sometimes called P cells, because they project to the parvocellular layers.
Thankfully Koniocellular cells project to the Koniocellular layer, so they’re just K cells.
And when these were discovered in cats, the parvo cells were called X cells and magno Y cells.
In the mechanics of materials, the components of the stiffness matrix are labeled C_{1111}, C_{1122}, C_{1313}, and so on. The inverse of the stiffness is the compliance, which goes by S_{1111}, S_{1122}, S_{1313}, \ldots
“For the moment we might very well call them DUNNOS (for Dark Unknown Nonreflective Nondetectable Objects Somewhere).” –Bill Bryson.
A wizard did it.
Hence multiple places named “Battery Park”.
Band Name “Viscous Fingers”
On further reflection, I’ve changed my mind on this:
Because, firstly, it’s not strictly 1 to 1 with generations. Since giant stars live as “little” as a few million years, there are stars that are potentially fifth or sixth generation or more.
(From googling, we guess that this is the case for some stars, based on their extremely high metallicity, but it seems there is no way to confirm for certain.)
Anyway, this is why it makes sense to have a term for stars that corresponds basically to its ancestral history, but is not strictly generations
And secondly, it’s actually convenient that we count backwards: because that’s the bit we don’t know. It might be that before the metal-poor stars there were black hole stars, and before that something else…no problem, they can be population 4, 5, 6 etc. Rather than 0, -1, -2…
Going forwards in time…we don’t really need another term, because we may be talking billions of years in the future before we need to name a whole new population of star.
(…ok, we might make models about the future evolution of the universe, but cosmologists are still going to use such terminology less than for the kinds of stars that we are going to potentially see with advanced telescopes some day).
Anyway, now I’ve spoiled the fun of my own thread, I bid you adieu
Taking a course in modern algebra changed my life. I have worked in that field for nearly 70 years.
The real problem with imaginary numbers is that all numbers are imagined. But I cannot think of a better name.
How about “orthogonal number” instead of imaginary, and “planar number” instead of complex?