• Question: if you discovered something what would you name it

    Asked by anon-205647 to Kathryn, Jose Angel, Gabriel on 4 Mar 2019.
    • Photo: Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez

      Jose Angel Martinez-Gonzalez answered on 4 Mar 2019:

      I am too bad to put a name to something…
      Everything would depend on what you discovered. If it were a material that would allow the water to dance without stopping, what do you think of the notstopwatdance? You see, I’m bad at doing this. Besides the cool names are already taken.

      One possibility I would value would be to open a contest to schools to help me. Surely all of you would participate with super cool names

    • Photo: Gabriel Gallardo

      Gabriel Gallardo answered on 5 Mar 2019:

      It depends. Some of the particles we’re trying to look for already have names, and some of them are kind of silly. For example, particles from a theory called supersymmetry are called _sparticles_. Get it? S-particles? Like super-particles? 😅
      Some people are lucky enough to have particles named after them. Fermions are named for Enrico Fermi, bosons are named after Satyendra Nath Bose, and the Higgs boson is named after Peter Higgs. Fermi, Bose, and Higgs predicted that their particle existed before there was proof for it. I don’t think they named their particles themselves though, that’s just what people call them because they had the idea first.
      As for myself, I don’t think I’d be so lucky to have a “Gallardo particle” named after me, but one could dream, couldn’t they? 😉

    • Photo: Kathryn Boast

      Kathryn Boast answered on 6 Mar 2019:

      If I discovered new dark matter particle, I think I’d go for the boastino – lots of particle names names end ‘ino’ – the bino, the neutrino, the wino, the neutralino, the gluino… (Not all of these have been discovered yet!) Actually the gluino reminds of me something – there’s a kind of particle called a ‘gluon’ which sticks the nucleus of an atom together – and it’s called that because it acts like glue! I like a good joke name. Did you know there’s a gene called ‘Sonic Hedgehog’?! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sonic_hedgehog

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