Hacker News Reader

Comment by dspillett | Hacker News Reader

> The existence of a Higgs boson has been confirmed with extremely high confidence. And this news... it's exciting in the sense that it's an important result, but it's a bit of a damper on those of us who were hoping to discover new secrets about the universe.

There is a certain beauty in not only accepting that you might be wrong, but actively wanting to be wrong because that could be so much more interesting!

And a certain sadness in the disappointment some obviously have when they accept that the less interesting outcome is the one that they receive.

View on HN

Well, it's a bit selfish really. It's a terribly interesting outcome as it is, but the particle physicists in the 70's and 80's got to have all the fun.

Sort of how the chemists in the 18th and 19th centuries got to have all the fun.

"I'll call it 'Aluminum.' No, wait! 'Aluminium!' Uh... ship that first print run of my book with the wrong spelling to North America. Nobody will notice!"

"I'll call it Potassium, because it's found in potash." "That's not very creative." "Fine, I'll call it Kalium and give it a symbol of K." "Where'd you get Kalium from?" "Well, it's very alkaline, you see. It's from potash, after all." "That's still not very creative!" "Fine. We'll call it Potassium, but give it a symbol of K. Happy now?"

It's still called Kalium in a bunch of languages.

Is that also the case for "natrium?"

Certainly: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/natrium

And those are also mostly the countries using Kalium: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/kalium

It misses Japanese, which uses German for a great many scientific and medical loanwords:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E3%82%AB%E3%83%AA%E3%82%A6%E...

Can't forget Wolfram!

Yep. Natrium is used in Norwegian at least.

German has both of those.

Yes, but that's not funny. The story about Aluminum isn't completely correct, either.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com