5 ms·
The official name of the LHCb experiment is the "Large Hadron Collider beauty" experiment, as named by the scientists themselves. So "beauty quark" is more corr
by isaacg 6y ago
The official name of the LHCb experiment is the "Large Hadron Collider beauty" experiment, as named by the scientists themselves. So "beauty quark" is more correct in this context.
https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb https://home.cern/science/experiments/lhcb
Moreover, the paper that describes the result that this article is discussing has "beauty quark" in the name: https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769 https://arxiv.org/abs/2103.11769
- pmontra 6y agoAnd "b is for beauty" https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Physics/Beauty-en.html https://lhcb-public.web.cern.ch/en/Physics/Beauty-en.html
- reedf1 6y agoAnd I wish they wouldn't have, for the sake of scientific clarity.
- irjustin 6y agoYea scientists are up there in terms of the people with the worst ability to name things. Right there with developers but our terrible naming conventions don't really make it to publications.
- andrewinardeer 6y agoSpaghettification
- twic 6y agoDrosophila geneticists have entered the chat
- aYsY4dDQ2NrcNzA 6y agoExplain?
- klyrs 6y agoI'd guess this is a dig at biology's naming tradition, for the purpose of showing that scientists as a whole aren't great at naming either. Or maybe people in general -- check out the wikipedia page for Mohammadabad: looks like there are hundreds of places with that name in Iran
- astrange 6y agoSvante Pääbo's human genetics lab (who discovered Denisovans and sequenced the first Neanderthals) has a policy of not using Latin names for anything, because he thinks they're pretentious but also they don't think any of their discoveries are different species. On the other hand, everyone else who discovers a hominin still gives it a new species name.
- jjk166 6y agoI would actually say that beauty is more scientifically clear. The various quantum numbers of the quarks are real physical quantities, but not ones for which we have a good way of conceptualizing in classical, macroscopic life. The up and down quarks aren't actually spinning, but they do kind of behave as if they were spinning, so their names make sense, but for the others there isn't even an analogue. Luckily no one expects to be able to visualize strangeness, and likewise charm and beauty convey quite well that the naming is arbitrary. Top and bottom on the other hand sound like they could refer to a "real" property, or perhaps represent two ends of a spectrum. While I've seen no evidence that confusion is rampant, it would be easy to see how confusion could arise. If anything, the Top quark should be renamed to something more whimsical, or both should be renamed to something more clearly arbitrary like heads and tails.