From Symmetry: “A brief etymology of particle physics”

Origin Story

The Origin Story for the Blog

I am telling the reader this story in the hope of impelling him or her to find their own story and start a wordpress blog. We all have a story. Find yours.

The oldest post I can find for this blog is “From FermiLab Today: Tevatron is Done” at the End of 2011 (but I am not sure if that is the first post, just the oldest I could find.

But the origin goes back to 1985, Timothy Ferris Creation of the Universe PBS, November 20, 1985, available in different videos on YouTube; The Atom Smashers, PBS Frontline November 25, 2008, centered at Fermilab, not available on Youtube; and The Big Bang Machine, with Sir Brian Cox of U Manchester and the ATLAS project at the LHC at CERN.

In 1993, our idiot Congress pulled the plug on The Superconducting Super Collider, a particle accelerator complex under construction in the vicinity of Waxahachie, Texas. Its planned ring circumference was 87.1 kilometers (54.1 mi) with an energy of 20 Tev per proton and was set to be the world’s largest and most energetic. It would have greatly surpassed the current record held by the Large Hadron Collider, which has ring circumference 27 km (17 mi) and energy of 13 TeV per proton.

If this project had been built, most probably the Higgs Boson would have been found there, not in Europe, to which the USA had ceded High Energy Physics.

The project’s director was Roy Schwitters, a physicist at the University of Texas at Austin. Dr. Louis Ianniello served as its first Project Director for 15 months. The project was cancelled in 1993 due to budget problems, cited as having no immediate economic value.

Some where I learned that fully 30% of the scientists working at CERN were U.S. citizens. The ATLAS project had 600 people at Brookhaven Lab. The CMS project had 1,000 people at Fermilab. There were many scientists which had “gigs” at both sites.

I started digging around in CERN web sites and found Quantum Diaries, a “blog” from before there were blogs, where different scientists could post articles. I commented on a few and my dismay about the lack of U.S recognition in the press.

Those guys at Quantum Diaries, gave me access to the Greybook, the list of every institution in the world in several tiers processing data for CERN. I collected all of their social media and was off to the races for CERN and other great basic and applied science.

Since then I have expanded the list of sites that I cover from all over the world. I build html templates for each institution I cover and plop their articles, complete with all attributions and graphics into the template and post it to the blog. I am not a scientist and I am not qualified to write anything or answer scientific questions. The only thing I might add is graphics where the origin graphics are weak. I have a monster graphics library. Any science questions are referred back to the writer who is told to seek his answer from the real scientists in the project.

The blog has to date 900 followers on the blog, its Facebook Fan page and Twitter.I get my material from email lists and RSS feeds. I do not use Facebook or Twitter, which are both loaded with garbage in the physical sciences.

That is my Origin Story

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richardmitnick 1:27 pm on May 30, 2017 Permalink Reply
Tags: Basic Research ( 11,879 ), Particle Physics ( 1,669 ), Symmetry Magazine ( 361 )
From Symmetry: “A brief etymology of particle physics”

Symmetry

05/30/17
Daniel Garisto

Illustration by Sandbox Studio, Chicago

Over the years, physicists have given names to the smallest constituents of our universe.

This pantheon of particles has grown alongside progress in physics. Anointing a particle with a name is not just convenient; it marks a leap forward in our understanding of the world around us.

The etymology of particle physics contains a story that connects these sometimes outlandish names to a lineage of scientific thought and experiment.

So, without further ado, Symmetry presents a detailed guide to the etymology of particles—some we’ve found and others we have yet to discover.

Editor’s note: PIE, referenced throughout, refers to proto-Indo-European, one of the earliest known languages.

[NOTE: IN THE FULL ARTCLE THESE ARE ALL HOT LINKS. TOO MANY FOR ME, GO TO THE FULL ARTICLE FOR THE LINKS.]

Discovered particles
Expand all
ion ion
fermion Fermi + on
lepton leptos + on
electron electric + on
muon mu-meson (contraction)
tau triton
neutrino neutro (diminutive)
quark quark
boson Bose + on
photon photo + on
Higgs boson Higgs + boson
W boson weak + boson
Z boson zero + boson
gluon glue + on
hadron hadros + on
baryon barys + on
proton protos + on
neutron neutral + on
meson mesos + on
antimatter anti + matter

Hypothetical particles
Expand all
axion Axion
chameleon chameleon
graviton gravity + on
majoron Majorana + on
tachyon tachy + on
supersymmetric particles super + symmetry

See the full article here .

Please help promote STEM in your local schools.

Stem Education Coalition

Symmetry is a joint Fermilab/SLAC publication.
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Richard Mitnick

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richardmitnick 1:27 pm on May 30, 2017 Permalink Reply Tags: Basic Research ( 11,879 ), Particle Physics ( 1,669 ), Symmetry Magazine ( 361 )

From Symmetry: “A brief etymology of particle physics”

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richardmitnick 1:27 pm on May 30, 2017 Permalink Reply
Tags: Basic Research ( 11,879 ), Particle Physics ( 1,669 ), Symmetry Magazine ( 361 )