posted
Particle physics has a lot of trying-to-be-funny names in it. For example,
- The quarks are named up, down, charm, strange, truth and beauty. - The unit of cross-section is a barn, as in 'can't hit the side of a.' The barn is 10^-25 cm^2. - There is a way of organising mesons known as the 'Eightfold Way'. - Names for detectors are deliberately chosen to acronymate (is that a word?) well : BaBar, Belle, ATLAS, ALICE, DELPHI... - Then there's the infamous 'penguin diagram', referring to a particular kind of process. Apparently (and I am not making this up) someone lost a darts match, and the penalty was to use the word 'penguin' in a journal submission. Given some illegal substances inside you, the Feynmann diagram describing these processes can be drawn to look slightly like a penguin. To the trained eye, at least. Hence such sentences in respectable physics journals as "The existence of penguins was proven at the BaBar experiment in 1999."
What funny jargon is there in your fields?
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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posted
Hmmf. Since no-one appreciates my humour, I shall take my post to another forum. *Sniffs in an offended manner*
Posts: 10645 | Registered: Jul 2004
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