26 Scientific Terms That Started As Jokes

YOLO
26 Scientific Terms That Started As Jokes

It’s easy to think of scientists as very serious people. After all, they deal in very serious matters: cures for diseases, substances that form the building blocks of society, the nature of our universe — you know, little things like that. And if they don’t take them seriously, very bad things can happen. Have you ever heard of the large hadron collider? Go down that rabbit hole and tell us how you would feel about technicians choreographing TikTok dances around there.

But all that seriousness takes a toll on you, and if you don’t get your sillies out, you might pull an oopsie and accidentally unmake the world. As a result, a lot of important inventions and ideas are named after things that simply made some PhD somewhere giggle. We found out some of them when user MortifiedPharrp4 asked r/AskReddit, “Which scientific term was named as a joke but is now widely accepted?

weaver_of_cloth 3y ago Quarks - up, down, charmed, strange...
LordJac Зу ago Physics has a thing for making humorous acronyms such as: MACHOs (Massive Compact Halo Objects) WIMPS (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles) STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement)
Eptraban 3y ago A gene named Really Interesting New Gene
pumpernickeljuice 3y ago The VLT or very large telescope in the Atacama desert in Chile. Also Pu as the atomic symbol for plutonium was initially a joke
Lost_Conversation_36 3y ago Aibohphobia. It is the fear of palindromes.
uberprodude Зу ago A nybble, sometimes spelled nibble, is a set of four bits. Since there are eight bits in a byte, a nybble is half of one byte.
Dagusiu Зу ago Everybody in computer vision/machine learning talks about YOLO with a straight face. It's just a widely accepted name for a now classic, fast object detector.
Automatic_Mulberry 3y ago The barn (b), a unit of area approximately the size of the nucleus of a uranium atom. It's hard to aim a particle beam that accurately, so the unit was named after the idiom couldn't hit the broad side of a barn.
stylus2000 Зу ago The Big Bang. Coined in 1947 by Fred Hoyle as a derisive description of the theory, it stuck. Hoyle continued to deride the theory until his death.
dreamtigerz Зу ago Imaginary numbers - Descartes was being derogatory with the name, but they turned out to be pretty useful after all.
Pajama-Han Зу ago Thagomizer: the spiked end of a stegosaurus's tail. It was officially named after the word was featured in a Farside comic
hoxbury 3y ago A 'whoop' of gorillas and a 'flange' of baboons... collective nouns that are now used in scientific settings, but were first introduced in a sketch in 'Not the Nine O'Clock News' with Rowan Atkinson as a gorilla...
6sidedluck Зу ago In particle physics there is a class of Feyman diagram called a penguin diagram. It was named because someone lost a bar bet and had to use the word penguin in their next publication.
Зу ago PENIS, aka Proton Enhanced Nuclear Induction Spectroscopy, is a nuclear magnetic resonance technique invented in MIT.
_MooFreaky_ Зу ago Penis was Latin slang but it morphed into the proper terminology It'd be like schlong becoming the proper name in thr future
_Shape_Shifter_15 3y ago The name Irritator for a species of sail backed dinosaur coming from the family of spinosaurids. The paleontologists got so irritated because a part of the skull was broken and they just couldn't attach it to the rest of the skull. They got so irritated that they named it Irritator. Now it's Irritator.
Sarke1 Зу ago Edited Зу ago The HTTP protocol has different response codes like 200 for success, 404 for not found, etc. HTTP response code 418 means I'm a teapot. It's part of the official spec and everything, and every modern browser supports it.
Galaara98 Зу ago TWAIN - is the name of the protocol used by page scanner to talk to a computer. Originally meant to be lowercase in reference to older english for two. It became upper cased to make the protocol fit in (like НТТР, TCP, etc.) Eventually it was widely accepted as if it was an acronym (like most protocols that are all uppercase) and the still prevailing meaning that has been widely adopted: Technology Without An Interesting Name
unbeast 3y ago The bhangmeter, a device for detecting nuclear explosions from space using their characteristic double flash. So called because bhang is a word for a variety of cannabis in one of the languages of India, and it was thought you'd have to be stoned to believe it would work. Proving that smart people should not be allowed within 15 feet of an unexploded pun.
Burn_the_children 3y ago Pirate-Ninja From Wikipedia: A Pirate-Ninja is defined as one kilowatt-hour (3.6 MJ) per Martian day, or sol. It is equivalent to approximately 40.55 watts. Andy Weir, author of The Martian, revealed in a 2015 interview with Adam Savage that the Curiosity rover team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory references milli-pirate-ninjas in their meetings.
RupFox 3y ago In computer science, a bug. People think that it's because there used to be literal bugs frying mainframe computers, but that's apocryphal. The term bug was used in mechanical engineering for a while. Later on, at the Harvard computer laboratory, two computer operators taped a moth in the logbook as a joke to say they found a literal bug in the Mark II. The joke caught on and was retold many times by Grace Hopper and others, leading to the term becoming mainstream.
tsondie21 Зу ago UNIX was named as a joke. There was an operating system called Multics which stood for Multiplexed Information and Computer Services that was used for computers where multiple users had to access the computer. It was useful but kind of clunky and was on its way to being abandoned when a small team decided to simplify it and make it work for only one user instead. This lead them to call it Unics as a riff on Eunic as they were removing features and making it single user. Somewhere down the line the CS got changed to
Loki-L Зу ago The fourth, fifth, and sixth derivatives of position are: snap, crackle and pop. The first four are position, velocity accelerations and jerk. You usually don't really encounter anything beyond acceleration, but jerk and sometimes snap had been around for some time. When further derivatives needed a name someone jokingly used crackle and pop after the cereal advertising: Snap, Crackle and Pop It stuck around and people actually started using the names in serious papers.
Torvaun Зу ago The Cox-Zucker machine is an algorithm named for its creators, David Cox and Steven Zucker. They met in grad school, and decided to work on unsolved problems together just because the name of anything they discovered would be remarkably obscene.
moveseph 3y ago In electrical Engineering there is a term called Ohms(S2) used for resistance. Some times you need the inverse which is called admittance. When we first started measuring admittance we called them Mhos() But the SI units foundation got upset that we didn't name a unit after a dead scientist so now we measure admittance in Siemens
patricksaurus 3y ago When a mineral is discovered, the discoverers have a chance to name it. It sometimes takes a name from the person who found it or the locale it was first observed. Mineral names have a tendency to have -ite at the end, such a halite, hematite, magnesite, phlogopite, etc. Not all, but many. A mineral was discovered in the town of Cummington, Massachusetts. It was named after its locale. ...it's a thinker.

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