Hacker News Reader

Comment by amadsen | Hacker News Reader

I'm a physicist who spent seven years working at the LHC and I've never heard of a "purposeful" move away from the term beauty quark. It just fell out of favor but some, including myself, still like to use that name on occasion, personally I like it much better.

The particle does not have a name in the official (PDG) listing, only a symbol "b". The "bottom" quantum number is universally called as such so one talks of "bottom hadrons" and so on. On the other hand the general area of research is called "b-physics" or "beauty physics", LHCb is the LHC-beauty experiment and so on. It makes perfect sense that this article uses "beauty" throughout for consistency.

At the end of the day its just a name and this particle happens to have more than one (as does the J/psi and others) and neither is more whimsical than the other. Physicists tend to be quite whimsical anyway, particle physicists perhaps especially so.

View on HN

I was given the impression by my professors that it was a purposeful move, maybe it was just in teaching and not research. I'll defer to you, the actual particle physicist.

I’d also heard something like this during my physics education - you’re not alone apparently. One name was apparently more ‘respectable’ than the other. Lol

heh there's a deep irony here, in a story about "how science communicators [supposedly] ditched the term favoured for capturing the public imagination, in order to instead favour a more descriptive factual term"...

...of which the story itself is an overly neat simplification that has spread by better capturing the imagination of descriptive-minded physics students, in the teachers' own science communicating :)

An example of how the educators drive the narrative for the future.

I kind of don't believe there is such a thing as "just a name". People persistently confuse names with the thing named. If you want to communicate truthfully, you have to take into account the psychology of your audience. So "it's just a name" is not a good reason for misleading names.

I realize this isn't a big deal for quarks, but it's been on my mind a lot. The application to politics is left as an exercise for the reader.

What do you do now? Is there a demand for CS skills at the LHC, and was it a fulfilling place to work in general? Presumably you lived in the UK that whole time?

The LHC is in Switzerland (not the UK) and in fact I'm still here. I was a data scientist for while. These days I'm back in research, but in a different field.

There is a huge demand for CS skills of all kinds. CERN has one of the largest SCADA installations in the world, runs its own internet exchange point, operates a network of computing centers with a million cpu and hundreds of PB of data, and maintains many many millions of lines of code of specialized software, just to give you an idea.

It is a fantastic place to work, the level of expertise and dedication among the people there (scientists and engineers alike) is very very high.

They have also shown an impressive 1000-machine kubernetes cluster running on GCP for analyzing data (they did a live demo at KubeCon in 2018 I believe where they ran the Higgs boson data analysis during a panel).

In any case, which authority told /u/reedf1 that studying the universe should be barred from being whimsical? Alan Watts would be laughing. So would the Joker. The universe is not meant to be taken so seriously. It is whimsical. And that is part of its beauty ;-)

I have absolutely no problem with it being whimsical. Actually I would like it to be as whimsical as possible, while still being easy and consistent to learn that is.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com