Wow, am I cranky today, or what?<\/p>\n
To make up for the previous three tediously political posts, here’s a more light-hearted physics poll question:<\/p>\n
\nWhat’s the dorkiest term in physics?<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Physicists have no real flair for naming things– either you get dull and prosaic names (“up” and “down” quarks), or strained attempts to be cute (“strange” and “charm” quarks). As a result, there are lots of dorky terms in physics, but what is the very dorkiest?<\/p>\n
My vote goes to the Dirac notation for wavefunctions.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
This one requires a little explanation: the Dirac notation comes out of the fact that certain operations in quantum physics are traditionally represented by putting a given quantity in angle brackets, like so:<\/p>\n
\n< x ><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
This means “multiply the operator in question by the wavefunction on the right, the complex conjugate of the wavefuncton on the left, and integrate the whole thing over all space.” The Dirac notation makes this more obvious, by representing a wavefunction as a half-bracket:<\/p>\n
\n| Ψ ><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
and the complex conjugate as a mirror-image half-bracket:<\/p>\n
\n< Ψ !<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
The operation normally represented by the angle bracket is then written like so:<\/p>\n
\n< x > = < Ψ | x | Ψ ><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n
so the angle-bracket form is obvious.<\/p>\n
Where’s the dorkiness? Well, the representation “| Ψ >” is called a “ket,” and “< Ψ | ” is called a “bra.” Put them together, and you have “bra” + “ket” = “bracket.”<\/p>\n
Ha.<\/p>\n
Ha.<\/p>\n
Ha.<\/p>\n
I think that’s hard to top, but maybe somebody else out there can come up with a dorkier bit of nomenclature. What’s your suggestion?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Wow, am I cranky today, or what? To make up for the previous three tediously political posts, here’s a more light-hearted physics poll question: What’s the dorkiest term in physics? Physicists have no real flair for naming things– either you get dull and prosaic names (“up” and “down” quarks), or strained attempts to be cute… Continue reading Dorky Poll: Dorky Nomenclature<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2137","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2137"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2137\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2137"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2137"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2137"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}