Comment by lokimedes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lokimedes | Hacker News Reader

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After we discovered the particle in June 2012, there was a large summer conference in Stockholm (a good few months before the Nobel announcement). In the spirit of jubilation the Municipality had arranged a classical “Nobel” reception at the Mayor’s Hall and banquet at the Vasa Museum in the evening.

As a good friend of the chair of the organizing committee, I was asked to help that evening, collecting invitations as people entered. After greeting the first 100 or so, up came this elderly man who has lost his invitation. He was very sorry, and asked if there was any way for him to prove he in fact was invited. I told the gentleman, that he could have mine in case there was any trouble. As Peter Higgs was allowed to enter the little dress rehearsal for what was to befall him in autumn, there was a warm chuckle around us.

I have met him on other occasions and perhaps it is exactly his non-selfish personality that has allowed the particle to carry his name in the first place. The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to individuals.

>The rest of particle physics is luckily void of attributing eternal properties of nature to individuals.

Physicists are blessed! Some fields are polluted with proper name derived jargon. Then learning anything is comparable to learn the phone book by rote. It sucks!

Physics is absolutely crammed with person names, though. Maxwell’s equations, Newtown’s laws, Boltzmann distributions, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, Einstein’s summation convention, Green’s formula, Lagrangian, Hamiltonian, etc etc etc. Not that I think it’s a problem.

Even if this were true (see, Newton's laws, Lagrangians and on and on), it's an odd claim that memorizing "quark" is any easier than remembering what a Hamiltonian is. Not to mention that memorizing jargon is a triviality barely worthy of footnote compared to actually learning the field.

But what about the units…?

Units are arbitrary, particles aren’t.

Newton might look foundational as 1 N = 1 kg * m/s^2, but if the kilogram had been defined as 1% smaller or the meter larger then so presumably would the Newton.

I personally like to define Tesla in terms of the fine structure constant..

Sometimes this frustrates me immensely in Mathematics.

but I like this, everyone fighting enough for human/science will be recorded and remember as long as we can

You recognized him, right? It was a little ambiguous from the prose

Edit: You say "we discovered" so presumably obviously yes you had to lol

I did indeed :) it as his presumption that I didn’t know who he was that made me connect with the OP’s article.

FWIW Bosons are named after a person

It is named after Prof Satyendra Nath Bose. A physicist and true polyglot from pre-independent India. He was in his twenties when he figured this out. Of course never really received any larger fame, as is customary for Theoretical scientists from South East Asia (well most of the time) but if anyone is interested here is the story - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satyendra_Nath_Bose

That’s interesting when you read the legacy section of the wiki. His work actually was the basis of 7 Nobel prizes but he himself did not get one.

You got me. But being a Fermion or a Boson is (IMO) a label for a generic property. and we have plenty of other such theoretical constructs named after the inventor: Weyl, Dirac, etc. we need language and labels to communicate ideas, so that is alight. But the Higgs particle and mechanism represents physical reality (now at least) which brings it to the level of electrons, quarks and the fundamental forces of nature. These names will stand for as long as our civilization. Who cares that someone predicted them a couple of years before their discovery when we are a century down the line. Just imagine if fire was known as the Peterson effect? Anyway that’s just my opinion.

I question both the point and the well-definedness of this distinction between the concrete and the abstract. Does the Lorentz factor not "represent physical reality" and will it not also stand until the end of civilization?

Why should a particle (almost) never be allowed to bear the name of its inventor, but an equation or a constant should?

The Planck length is another unassailable example in my opinion.

And while Gell-Mann did not name them after himself, “three quarks for Muster Mark” is a delightful origin of that particle’s name.

We started with up and down quarks, and then discovered the charmed and strange ones. It would have been appropriate, given the trend in quark naming, to call the next two gell and mann, but Feynman would have had a fit.

I wonder how bose-einstein condensates would taste. Forbidden ice cream?

As are fermions, but not hadrons ("stout"), baryons ("heavy"), mesons ("intermediate"), or leptons ("thin", "fine").

It was only when I saw the French spelling of Baritone is Baryton that I made the etymological connection between the "heavy" particle and the "heavy" male voice part.

or tachyons (“fast”). What, what do you mean they don't exist?

Even things that don't exist can have a name that does exist

And of course fermions.

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