Questions tagged [terminology]
For questions about terms, definitions and related concepts used in science and mathematics.
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Where did the naming structure of particles come from (suffix -on)?
I was looking at a list of particles, and I noticed that many of them ended in -on. Proton, electron, neutron, lepton, etc. Is there a historical (or linguistic) reason behind this naming structure?
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History of the term innovation and its difference with invention?
Today, research and science is often associated to innovation (particularly by governments and funding agencies). I would like to understand how we got here and when the use of innovation as a ...
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How did the 'Poincaré patches' get their name?
De Sitter space and Anti de Sitter space are two of the most important solutions to the Einstein field equations. One famous method to obtain these spacetimes is to consider a $N$-dimensional ...
Danu♦
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When were the abbreviations of chemical elements standardized?
This is going to be tricky because the discovery/synthesis of elements has taken place over centuries. It might be best to restrict this purely to the elements contained on Dmitri Mendeleyev's table, ...
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Why does the statute mile have the length that it has?
Why was our (statute) mile established as it was?
This happened in 1593, by the order of Elizabeth I which said:
"A Mile ſhall contain eight Furlongs, every Furlong forty Poles, and every Pole ...
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What is the story behind various uses of the word "spectrum"?
Here are five distinct uses of the word spectrum in physics and mathematics:
Spectrum (optics): The range of colors in the rainbow
Spectrum (particle physics): The range of electromagnetic ...
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Did ancient/medieval non-European cultures have a concept of energy? If so, what are the similarities and differences to the modern concept?
For example, do we find something related to the modern energy concept in Ancient China, Ancient India, or the Islamic Golden Age?
Among "similarities and differences", conservation is obviously ...
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Who invented the integers?
I know that Kronecker claimed it was God's doing, and that even prehistoric humans used some ways of counting. But I am curious where the idea of a sequence of numbers stretching out into infinity ...
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What was the definition of a scientist and how did it evolve? When was science categorized?
I'm asking this question as I've noticed that scientists like Gauss, Newton, Euler, Lagrange etc developed theories in many scientific fields(these ones that I know of were mostly interested in math ...
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What is the reason for the 'electromagnetism terminology' when discussing the conserved quantities found through Noether's theorem?
In (theoretical) physics, it is customary to describe the system under consideration in terms of the Lagrangian. One of the major advantages of this approach is that it allows us to analyze the ...
Danu♦
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Question on "What St. Augustine didn't say about mathematicians"
In the note "What St. Augustine didn't say about mathematicians" (which appeared sometime in 1991 in the pages of the Pi Mu Epsilon Journal), R. P. Boas, Jr. mentioned, among other things, that in the ...
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How did we come up with the name "atomic bomb"?
At first, my initiate question was: What is the difference between an atomic and a nuclear bomb?:
Nuclear bombs are of two types — those that depend on fission, like atomic bombs, and those that ...
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What's the etymology of an engineering/software bug?
I read the Wikipedia page on Software bugs. It does have a section on its etymology. Albeit interesting it doesn't answer my question but merely notes that the term bug was used in 1878:
Use of the ...
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Contributions to chemistry from medieval Arabia
A lot of chemical terms such as alcohol, aldehyde, sugar/azucar, amalgam etc. are of Arabic origin.
Did Arabic chemistry in medieval times achieve any scientific insights still valid today (such as '...
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Why don't we name the Higgs boson a "higgson"?
We have fermions (named after Fermi) and bosons (named after Bose). Why don't we name the particle corresponding to the Higgs field a "higgson"? The superpartner particle (sparticle) of the Higgs ...
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