Physics and astronomy's strange language: hot to befuddle the public.

• Author: Scherer, Sarah Williams

SOME PEOPLE spend their days with pencils and paper clips, others with diapers and shopping carts. Physicists and astronomers, though, deal with WIMPs and MACHOs, giants and dwarfs, and bubble chambers. Then, there are the subatomic particles called quarks, which figure prominently in physics and astronomy. There are six types: up, down, beauty, truth, charm, and strange quarks. Strange quarks? They all sound pretty strange. The terms seem more at home in Alice's Wonderland than in the realm of serious science.

The nomenclature scientisis use stands out in rebellion against typical academic jargon. The men and women who study the world at scales ranging from the tiny to the huge have named their discoveries utilizing imagination that reflects their own personalities. These are scientists who blend the creativity of artists with the rigor of mathematicians.

"As a lot, we're very susceptible to big, private jokes," indicates Ohio State University physicist Bill Palmer. There are legends and myths behind the naming of many terms, stories passed down like family secrets. Take the legend of the penguin diagrams--schematic drawings that represent the interaction between subatomic particles. The diagrams have nothing to do with the flightless birds. The term was coined when two physicists playing darts made a bet. Whoever lost the game would have to include the word "penguin" in his next scholarly work.

"There's a touch of the sixth-grader in all of us," Palmer points out. Moreover, a sort of one-upsmanship has pitted scholars in a competition to author goofy terms. Palmer's personal dream is to see the theory of quarks enlarged to include the terms "smell," "stench," and "odor." He feels that "We can afford to be a little silly because we know how to use the arcane math terms to counter accusations that we're just juvenile and silly."

Some physicists like to think that scholars in some of the other disciplines have "physics envy," a yearning to be precise, quantitative, and, most of all, to be taken seriously by those in the "hard" sciences. That is why, a physicist might argue, other fields strain to be serious, filling their journals with faux-intellectual language that is indicative of a basic insecurity--of physics envy.

How do physicists and astronomers name their brainchildren? The process appears to be pretty random. Take, for instance, the naming of the quark. Long ago, "quark" referred to a bird's caw (or, in German, a runny cheese)...