Topology:
Whimsical names in physics:
“The Physics of Silly Names”
http://thoughtsarise.blogspot.com/2009/03/physics-of-silly-names.html
- hairy ball theorem : one cannot comb the hair flat on a hairy ball without creating a cowlick. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hairy_ball_theorem
- Seven Bridges of Königsberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_Königsberg
- Four color map problem: how many colors does it take to color a map? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-color_theorem (first major theorem to be proven using a computer)
- Travelling Salesman Problem: Given a list of cities and the distance between all of them, find a shortest possible tour that visits each city exactly once. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traveling_salesman_problem
- three cottage problem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three-cottage_problem
Whimsical names in physics:
- Quark: taken by Murray Gell Man from a James Joyce novel and the line “three quarks for Mr. Marks”
- Gluons: particles that “glue” quarks together
- WIMPS: Weakly Interacting Massive Particles
- Boojum: in the physics of superfluidity, a boojum is a geometric pattern on the surface of one of the phases of superfluid helium-3, whose motion can result in the decay of a supercurrent. The boojum was named by David Mermin of Cornell University in 1976. He was inspired by Lewis Carroll's poem The Hunting of the Snark. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boojum_(superfluidity)
- neutrino: “little neutral one” in Italian
- quark types: up, down, strange, charmed, top (was initially called “truth”), bottom (was initially called “beauty”); quarks also come in three “colors”: red, blue, and green
- black hole
- worm hole
- inflation theory
- GUTS: Grand Unified Theories
- the Higgs boson is sometimes called the “God particle”
“The Physics of Silly Names”
http://thoughtsarise.blogspot.com/2009/03/physics-of-silly-names.html
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