PhD in Applied Nuclear and Particle Physics. I enjoy gardening, basketball (go Nuggets!), D&D, science, and hifi audio equipment.
Migrated here due to ongoing issues on kbin:kbin.social account page
Physics is a mixed bag with this stuff. Gell-Mann came up with the name quarks after a line from Finnegan's Wake because Joyce referenced them as coming in three. It was a nonsense word inserted just to rhyme with Mark, Park, etc, so its pronunciation in physics isn't even correct, but it was fun and physicists were just having a good time with it.
Three quarks for Muster Mark! Sure he has not got much of a bark And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
Then we got the strange/charm and top/bottom (which was originally the beauty/truth, so bullet dodged there) so the quarks really got all the fun names. Strong Force physics in general gets the good stuff: Axions were named after a detergent because they helped "clean up" the strong CP-violation problem of the standard model. Fantastic, no notes.
Neutrinos (my field of study), had so much potential for fun, stupid naming that was squandered. The neutrino was originally proposed with the name "neutron" by Pauli, but then the actual neutron was discovered and observed first, so the name got pinched. To remedy this, the electron neutrino was dubbed "neutrino" or little neutron (they didn't know that other flavors of neutrino existed). Meanwhile, the muon neutrino was originally supposed to be the neutretto (before they realized that the neutral leptons were related by the different particle generations), so we could have had a world where each generation of neutral lepton was just another combination of neutron + diminutive italian suffix.
- Neutrino
- Neutretto/neutronetto
- Neutrello/neutronello
Then, when the mass eigenstates were confirmed, we could have diversified and gone with big suffixes to indicate that neutrinos have mass.
- Neutroni
- Neutrachione/neutronachione
- Neutrozzo/neutronozzo
But noooooo, particle physics decided to just give neutrinos the lamest possible names, electron/muon/tau neutrinos for flavor states and m_1/m_2/m_3 neutrino for mass states. I am ashamed of my predecessors for what they've done.
Don't even get me started on the J/Psi debacle...
As one of the most senior grad students in my dept, holy fuck this hits hard.
I see your dramatic girl and raise you a dramatic crazy boy:
Ahhh, okay, I see that I suppose
Maybe I am just dumb, but I don't get it. The sentence structure is odd, but otherwise this just reads as a kid looking to earn some extra scratch.
Gell-Mann said it sounds like "quart", Joyce rhymed it with Park, it is a silly word and the pronunciation is as fluid as you desire.