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Talking about words
Strangelets
June 17, 2008
Diagram of quark
People are excited about the imminent start-up of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN on the Swiss-French border. Some skeptics think that the collision of sub-atomic particles there will create a black hole just north of the Alps and the earth will collapse through it into a tiny, dense mass. Such might be the consequence of creating strangelets—"weird hypothetical particles."
Physicists scoff; the anxious worry; doomsday predictors calculate; this column addresses words.
Strangelet is not hard to figure out: it's a root (strange) and a suffix (-let)—a little something-or-other like booklet and piglet.
Sub-atomic physicists would do well to create a nomenclature board, or, if that sounds too expensive and bureaucratic, they might consult a word guy. Back when, we got along fine with words like electron, proton, and neutron, and the words looked scientific to high-school physicists because they were Greek. Not that we knew Greek, of course, but we knew what Greek looked like. Hadron looks Greek too—and it is—and was coined back in 1961 as a cover name for all these particles.
The nice thing, so far, about these terms from Greek was that they had fixed definitions, and it isn't easy to mix them up. Everybody agreed what an electron was. In the 1950s, the late U-M physicist H. Richard Crane measured how they spin. Of course the scientists couldn't let a clear thing alone, so they changed spin to gyromagnetic ratio or g-factor. These terms cleansed spin from semantic noise (itself a term from physics) and made the idea both opaque (to lay people) and clear (to scientists) at the same time.
In order to understand parts smaller than the familiar particles, the physicists needed yet another opaque term, quark.
The particular one who made up quark dismissed Greek and was less satisfied with ordinary terms than Professor Crane had been. He declared that he had made up the pronunciation before making up the spelling—how do you suppose he thought words were ordinarily made? Then he found quark in one of his "occasional perusals" of James Joyce's novel Finnegan's Wake. In Joyce's usage, quark has no connection with any sort of particle, but the spelling looked better to him that kwork for the sounds that had been whispered in his ear. Wisely, the etymologists have treated the connection between quark and James Joyce as pretentious hooey.
If you consult the Wikipedia for quark, you find this explanation for the six quarks so far imagined:
There are six different types of quark, usually known as flavors: up, down, charm, strange, top, and bottom.
The entry continues: "Their names were chosen arbitrarily based on the need to name them something that could be easily remembered and used."
Words like electron, hadron, and even quark are easily remembered because they are hardly used in ways the physicists didn't define. But with a word like strange, the physicists got a live word by the tail, and they can hardly rassle it into submission.
From the point of view of words, making particle physics look as if ordinary people could understand it is not helpful. Better to leave us wandering ignorantly in the darkness among gluons, muons, and leptoquarks than thinking charm means some particles allure and ones that have flavor might be tasty. They are all, at the end of the day, strangelets.
is Professor Emeritus of English Language and Literature at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn