Eponymity in Physics

A physicist wanting to make an impact on the field most often imagines his or her name attached to an Equation, or a Theory. Or even, if they really want to move mountains, a Law. I have no idea what mathematicians think about, but I would assume that they are hoping to come up with Theorems and Conjectures. Of course, not everyone is an Einstein or a Kepler, able to remake a subject and declare a Law. But if you carve out a niche for yourself, or invent a novel way of dealing with a certain topic, you're virtually assured of getting something. For an elegant discovery, you could have an Angle named after you, or a Number. Or in a more bizarre direction, a Sea or Paradox. de Sitter has an entire Universe! Me? If I could become the first person since Isaac Newton with an eponymous Bucket I would consider myself a success. There are so many strange things you could find named in your honor that I have compiled an extensive list of them.

First, some of the most common:

Equation
Formula
Law
Theorem
Theory
Hypothesis
[A Unit]	Newton, Gauss, Joule
[A Constant]	Planck, Boltzmann
Function	Riemann-Zeta, Bessel
Effect	Mössbauer, Stark, Bohr, Gunn-Peterson, etc.

And then of course, there are rarer terms. These trend very roughly from less to more obscure.

Field	Fermionic, Bosonic, Higgs
Matrix	Kobayashi, Cabibbo
Relation	Heisenberg, Tully-Fisher
Principle	Copernican, Pauli Exclusion
Model	Schwinger, Bohr
Method	Schrödinger
Postulate	Planck, Weyl
Approximation	Born
Space	Minkowski, Fock, Hilbert
Metric	Friedmann-Robertson-Walker, Minkowski
Distribution	Wigner, Bose-Einstein, Fermi-Dirac
___-on	Fermi, Bose
___-ian	Laplace, Hamilton, Riemann
Notation	Dirac
Potential	Coulomb, Yukawa
Action	Stueckelberg, Proca
Inequality	Minkowski, Bell
Limit	Chandrasekhar
Tensor	Riemann
Scalar	Ricci
Gauge	Newtonian
Diagram	Feynman
Radiation	Cherenkov, Hawking
Cycle	Carnot, Born
Interpretation	Bohm, Copenhagen
Paradox	Einstein-Podolski-Rosen, Olber, Fermi
Problem	Rabi, Fermi
Experiment	Milikan Oil Drop
Spectrum	Mössbauer
Conjecture	Witten
Interaction	Yakawa
Amplitude	Feynman
Operator	d'Alembert
Particle	Higgs, Planck
Neutrino	Majorana, Dirac
Motion	Brownian
Length	Jeans
Number	Avogadro, Chandrasekhar, Euler
Surface	Fermi
Condensate	Bose-Einstein
Radius	Schwartzschild, Bohr
Convention	Einstein Summation
Transform	Forier, Laplace
Series	Balmer, Lyman
Line	Lyman, Balmer
Rules	Slater
Scattering	Compton, Rayleigh, Thompson
Variable	Cepheid, RR Lyrae
Diffusion	Bohm
Diffraction	Bragg
Junction	Josephson
Expansion	Taylor
Manifold	Riemann
Topology	Picard
Mechanism	Higgs
Peak	Wein
Test	Tolman surface brightness
Repulsion	Coulomb
Epoch	Planck
Parameter	Hubble
[An Element]	Einstein, Fermi, Curie, Mendeleev, Lawrence, Nobel
Time/Mass/Energy/Temperature /Density/Power/Current/Length	Planck
Energy/Level/Hole/Velocity /Temperature	Fermi
Wavelength	de Broglie
Boson	Higgs
Profile	Hernquist
Criterion	Landau
Rigidity	Born
Cross-section	Thompson
Zone	Brillouin, (also see, List of Zones)
State	Hartle-Hawking
Angle	Weinberg
Universe	de Sitter, Lemaître
Sea	Dirac, Fermi
Magneton	Bohr
Splitting	Zeeman
Forest	Lyman-alpha
Blob	Lyman-alpha
Swindle	Jeans
Trough	Gunn-Peterson
Window	Gamow
Cage	Faraday
Engine	Carnot
Bucket	Newton
Tuning Fork	Hubble
Golden Rule	Fermi
Pancake	Zel'dovich
Brain	Boltzmann
Demon	Maxwell
Cat	Schrödinger

If anyone else is able to repeat that last one, I will be highly impressed. I would also like to point out that the Higgs boson may be the only phenomenon or concept that has two namesakes, since the term boson originally comes from Satyendra Bose! If you can think of anything else let me know and I'll add it.

Galactic violence

If you ever have to give an overview of tidal forces in the galactic halo, and your presentation is fairly poor, you can always make an effort to redeem yourself with one of these breathtaking n-body simulations. I know this from experience. John Dubinski, astrophysicist at CITA is responsible for these clips modeling the gravitational interaction of hundreds of millions of particles to show behavior not realistically calculatable by hand. And even if it was, it wouldn't look as cool. Probably the best known of these is the predicted collision of the Milky Way with Andromeda in 3 billion years or so. There is also a film of what this is going to look like from the perspective of the sun (in this speculative outcome, our star is pulled out of its orbit in the commotion and thereafter follows a winding irregular path around the new hybrid galaxy). My favorite though would have to be the dark matter evolution clip. You can't really get a more expansive subject for animation than "history of all (dark) matter over the 14 billion year course of the universe's existence." And there are more. I dare you to watch the clip of the inside of a globular cluster and not flip out and destroy civilization like those people in Nightfall.

It isn't possible to overstate how impressive these all are. No one could watch them without being filled with a sense of the splendor and majesty of nature n-body simulations.

[Crass alternate title: "If I said you had a nice n-body would you hold it against me?"]

Hot Hot Heat

Sometimes I have to hand it to those APOD hacks. Even if they are pompous frauds who think their privileged selection of photos makes the world go round, they occasionally dig up something excellent. True to form, today's installment is in no way a 'picture,' even though it is really cool. Rather, it is a time-lapse of the surface of the sun, shot in super-duper high definition. Amazingly, each one of those solar 'granules' is the size of an Earth continent. Much appreciation to the observers and those who assembled this stunning clip. Continuing derision to the posers who pointed it out. Way to link to the Wikipedia article for 'Sun' in your 'explanation by a professional astronomer,' APOD. Real professional.
[Or AVOD, or ANPOD or whatever you should be called on one of the days when you don't live up to your name.]

Bubble time

For the bubble-loving astronomers out there, two bubble-related games:

• Bubbles (Avoid obstacles, get bigger!)



• Pipi The Jumping Bubble (Jump from bubble to bubble, rocket upwards endlessly!)

Both of these are super-realistic and educational.

Prediction

Despite my 'absence' I will offer a brief unrelated baseball prediction which may be fulfilled in the next several years. I think that managers will start differentiating between different types of pitches in pitch counts -- at least for hurlers who throw pitches of varying strenuousness. I am tired of seeing Wakefield getting treated with the same metric as guys who don't throw 70 mph floaty-dopey fluttah balls. For example, you could count fastballs and splitters as 1, while making curveballs and changes .75, and knuckleballs .5. It would probably be possible to model more accurately how far pitchers can go into game. Of course, someone would have to come up with better values for the different pitches but I am sure that someone will think of this soon enough. If they're smart.

Earthly responsibilities

It is a blog cliché to apologize for not blogging one's blog enough. But I'm not a cliché-maker, so I'm not sorry. In fact, I am the opposite of sorry-- I'm indignant. Here I am, providing day after day of constant excellence while getting ripped off by APOD, Slate, and Zosia, and I am supposed to apologize for being so awesome that people would miss my presence while I tend to my earthly responsibilities? I think not.

I'm not totally disappearing from The Topography (yes, that's what I'm calling it now apparently), I'm just buried in work for the next fortnight, so lower your expectations yet further.

100,000

Congratulations Iron Eagle! My car has now driven far enough to circle the Earth four times.

[The vehicle's namesake is actually from another nickname that I heard somewhere for Red Sox reliever Mike Timlin that struck me as extremely appropriate. (Since, you know, he spends his free time bowhunting wild boars, wrestling bears, and "taking care of the pigeon problem" at Fenway.) Being a small, gas-saving station wagon, that sounds like it is running on batteries, the contrast was too much to resist. Caw!]

Collapsed Eggfunction

More art! This time, a New Yorker cover features a blackboard with a bunch of quantum physics equations and paper strewn everywhere. Presumably, to go along with the LHC article. The equations are real, but not realistic. They are scribblings of first/second year quantum mechanics. I can't imagine a situation where you would ever write a bunch of calculation-type stuff and then circle the Schrödinger equation in the center of the board. Or write out explicitly that neutrons decay into p + e + v-bar. Unless you were crazy and just trying to convince everyone that you were a physicist...

Is the New Yorker expecting us to be that clever? I doubt it. The whole success of that publication is in getting people to feel guilty for not understanding jokes about Sartre, but wanting others to think that they do -- and therefore buying the magazine to leave visibly lying around the house. But these are usually the same kind of people who will proudly blurt out that they don't know what a square root is at their swanky dinner parties, so you can't count on them to feel insecure about not knowing much science.

The point of the drawing is actually I suppose, "look at this guy with his increadibly complicated work, and yet who is still boiling an egg in a totally normal way. How ironic!" But it doesn't really strike me as witty or profound. How, exactly, should he be boiling an egg differently? By putting it on some automated flash-fryer triggered by a nuclear decay, and then observing it so that he doesn't have to eat the superposition of a boiled and unboiled egg?

Nice drawing though.

Satellite Tracker

Courtesy Backreaction, a neat tool from the ESA that shows you where any of 12 Earth-orbiting objects are at any given time. Notably Hubble and the ISS.

Martian Art

NASA now has an official Mars as Art gallery, featuring some surprisingly good photographs from the "Total Recall Planet." For a place no humans have visited, they came up with a good list. Just more proof of something we all know deep down: the robots don't need us, even for art. Oh, and while we're at it, here are some Martian pictures by those other reds, the Soviets for comparison. They are all pretty lousy. It is a strange thing, after trying a few missions to Mars in the 60's and early 70's the USSR sort of gave up and sent a ton of probes to Venus instead, while we kept, and continue to be obsessed with Mars. I don't really get it, did we each feel like cornering the market on our own particular planet instead of competing? Is it some cultural thing? I still think Venus is cool, but the next mission there isn't for another 3 years. And even that isn't one of the cool kind that crashes into the planet and gets eaten away by acid. Terrible job.

[via]

I am better than you

I gave blood today, because I love the world and its many peoples. But clandestinely, as a secret admirer does. Or a stalker.

Some of the other grad students and I raced. I got 7 minutes even. They got 11.5 and 11 minutes, so I blew them out of the water. Like a stuck pig! Oink. But guy #3 came in later and managed a 6 minuter, so I slipped down the rankings to 2nd. So it goes. I think I should have been allowed to give more blood than them, because I'm a big guy and I've got more than I need, but the blood bank people didn't want it. Lame. Maybe I'll come back next week and see if I can donate my Chi or "life force," or clean conscience, or bone marrow. It took a while to wait to give blood, that could be better too. I want to swoop in, (already bleeding perhaps), give up a pint, slap on a band-aid, and sprint for the exit. Then wake up an hour later, get some ice for my head, and be done with it. There were some sainted people who seemed to be donating plasma in the corner with some crazy machines. How come they didn't advertise that one? I'd do it. They want me to be magnanimous? I'll shove my magnanimosity down their fucking throats. A priest had taken the afternoon off from molesting little boys to do it, but I think it was a scam -- machines don't need blood, they feed on copper wire and dust (at least the carpet cleaning ones). Maybe the robots are stocking up on blood so that we won't have any when they decide to attack humanity.

I got free juice, cookies, and an inflated sense of moral superiority.

List of Zones (updated!)

Neutral zone, zone of avoidance, zone of alienation, Twilight Zone, thermal zone, torrid/temperate/frigid zones, 'the' zone, match-up zone (of the zone defense), zone of inhibition, zone of aeration, zone of accumulation, Zone Horror, zone of ablation, death zone, zone of exclusion, zone of habitability, zones of occupation (Allied, Soviet, German, etc), zone of subduction, zone of stability (laser, nuclear), zone of wastage, convection zone.

Update 5/28: quake zone, danger zone, red zone, industrial zone, radiation zone, safety zone, Brillouin zone, calzone.

Messy Lines

• A commenter challenged me to draw Africa. There is no way in hell I am going to do that. I will however show an image from a map of the world I drew "from memory" in 7th grade geography. This represents the apex of my knowledge of African cartography. It is pretty pathetic. I mean, 'Togo'? I'm pretty sure I made that up.
  
  All in all it was a pretty cool project. During the year we learned one continent at a time, and how to draw it on a completely blank page and get the orientation and relation of everything correctly. At the end of the year we did the entire globe on one big square in about a week. I can't say that everyone followed the spirit of the 'memory' challenge entirely, but we were not permitted simply to copy anything, or have a book in the room where we drew these, so I remembered it for at least some period of time. As you can tell from this, the final product was not without its mistakes, unintentional and intentional.


• Flash programming tools are apparently available to psych wards nowadays. This is good news, because if they weren't, this game wouldn't exist. "Game, game, game and again game; or belief systems are small clumsy rolling-type creatures" features 12 levels of creepy psychotic rambling fun. As you move your flashing rolling-type creature through the level, meaningless crazy text pops up inexplicably all over the screen, your score (a string of strange arrow-like symbols) steadily rises (or falls) unaffected by your actions, and paranoid scribblings criss-cross the background for no reason. I tried to quote mine it for some particularly salient example of this madness, but it simply wasn't possible, everything that pops up is equally good. Whether this was designed by a schizophrenic, or just made to look that way, it is clear that this person has a future doing Radiohead's web design. [via]
  


• The five-second rule appears to have some basis. This paper written of in this NY Times article, measured whether there are differences in bacteria pickup depending on how long food touches the ground. "Left for a full minute [instead of five seconds], slices collected about 10 times more than that from the tile and carpet, though a lower number from the wood." The article also points out that 60% of people are aware of the rule, so we can at least be glad that we can at least get a majority of people to accept a scientific viewpoint, regardless of what it happens to be.[via]