What are the best words of science?

[ryan albery]

Hey all, I'm just kicking back next to a lake with a line in the water- solar powered internet rocks. Tipping back a few beers towards the sunset, tipsy-haspy waiting for a strike... and wondered what peoples' favorite words of science might be?

Parallax for me, that's a cool word. Solid concept; easy to remember cause it rolls off the tongue like hopping across a creek. But saying quark... that word makes me go, 'hmmm, that's a stupid sounding word.'

I tried earnestly to describe what a superfluid was to a friend, but she couldn't stop laughing. The word will never be the same.

Condensate, that's a cool word too. There just went a flock of geese, on their migration south in a V formation cause they can feel the vorticis.

 

[dlgoff]

"Set" ... the hook.

 

[ryan albery]

check the 'drag'...

 

[dlgoff]

Will you be needing "Heat Transfer" ... in a skillet?

 

[lisab]

Oh so many.

Lenticular.
Microscopy.
Spectrophotometer.
Quark.
Neutrino.

 

[collinsmark]

Hmmm. Let me think. Recently I've taken a liking to the word virialization (as how it applies to dark matter and the virial theorem).

Spaghettification is always a good one. Ya' can't go wrong with that.

But saying quark... that word makes me go, 'hmmm, that's a stupid sounding word.'

I wonder if that that was the intended purpose. It could be. Murray Gell-Mann coined the term "quark" as applied to subatomic particles. But Murray Gell-Mann didn't invent the word itself, per-se. He got it from a literary work called Finnegans Wake by James Joyce.

Three quarks for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn't got much of a bark
And sure any he has it's all beside the mark.​

If there's one thing to know about Finnegans Wake its that the book has a slew of "made up" words and phrases that nobody truly comprehends (outside the mind of Joyce, perhaps).

 

[lisab]

Barn.

 

[ryan albery]

Joyce-give or take, back and forth, up or down; strange and charmed sounds pretty cool.

 

[collinsmark]

Barn.

I had to look that one up. I love it! :!)

A barn is a unit of area defined as 10^-28 square meters.

The etymology of the unit barn is whimsical: during wartime research on the atomic bomb, American physicists at Purdue University who were deflecting neutrons off uranium nuclei (similar to Rutherford scattering) described the uranium nucleus as "big as a barn". Physicists working on the project adopted the name "barn" for a unit equal to 10⁻²⁴ square centimetres. Initially they hoped the American slang name would obscure any reference to the study of nuclear structure; eventually, the word became a standard unit in particle physics.​

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barn_%28unit%29

 

[Pythagorean]

Abiogenesis
Spatiotemporal

 

[DennisN]

Abiogenesis is a cool word.

I also like these:
Equinox
Luminosity
Flux
Albedo

 

[jtbell]

I like the "mho" as the unit of conductance (inverse of the "ohm" as the unit of resistance).

And in particle physics we talk about "flavo(u)rs" of fundamental particles (electron / muon / tau for leptons, or up / strange / top for quarks).

 

[Mhorton91]

I've always been a fan of "positron".

And I heard "tachyon" somewhere, but I can't remember if it's a real thing or not, regardless, cool sounding.I had never heard of "barn" as it was referenced above. That is awesome.

 

[HeLiXe]

parsecs

 

[HeLiXe]

of the aforementioned I also like parallax, neutrino, positron, quark. Muon is pretty cool too.

 

[Student100]

Colonoscopy, it just sounds cringe worthy by its own right.

 

[Enigman]

Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilicovolcanoconiosis.

 

[Curious3141]

Pseudopseudohypoparathyroidism.

Yes, it's a real thing, and there's no typo! One of the longest words in the English language belongs to medical science.

(Oh, and although Enigman's word is even longer and also refers to a medical condition, it's often considered to be purposefully contrived to be as long as possible. It's basically just a verbose expression for silicosis. Whereas the word I gave was coined more "naturally").

 

[epenguin]

Input, output, feedback, signal/noise. All I think 20th century to-the-point coinages with an American sound.

Ones I hate are those coming from silly 'in' jokes. Amber mutants, Northern blots, Western blots, buckyballs.

Mho is borderline.

 

[Enigman]

http://www.chm.bris.ac.uk/sillymolecules/sillymols.htm

 

[Evo]

"ooops"

 

[mheslep]

"ooops"

 

[MathJakob]

I'd have to go with Neutrinos or Plutinos because they sound like cute cuddly things :thumbs:

 

[dlgoff]

How about synthetic elements. e.g. Einsteinium

 

[fourier jr]

how about

gluon
szyzygy
theorem 90

topology has some colourful names for things like
ham sandwich theorem
taxi cab metric

 

[AlephZero]

IMO the best words are "the funding for your next project has been approved"

 

[dipole]

Except for their name, lots of terms associated with black holes:
Event Horizon
Singularity
Accretion Disk
quasar

 

[bp_psy]

Personal Statement. Statement of purpose
...and of course anatidaephobia

 

[DennisN]

Forgot this beautiful term: Fourier transform.
Just lovely. Sounds fancy, advanced and wicked, almost like lobotomy:

Now, my dear friend, I will perform a Fourier transform on you.

 

[AlephZero]

I like the Franglais term "modelization". It sounds much more philosophically esoteric than just "setting up a model".