Quantum mechanics is seriously sexy . That’s what keeps the public coming back for more with the drool hangin from their spittle-flecked lips (repeat this often enough and it might actually come true).

Without a sexy lingo to bamboozle and baffle, physics eggs ain’t got nothing to keep people’s attention ‘cept their rugged good looks and scintillatin’ personalities.

So labs hire hampers of postdocs whose sole task is to invent new words that’ll keep the public a-gazin’ and a-gawpin at every shiny new pebble that is thrown their way.

Yer probably didn’t realise it but all the latest buzzwords were invented in this way: atomtronics, quamputing, brane theory and the ballsheet model of particle physics (OK, ah made that one up).

Normally, these postdocs are thrown a stale crust to keep em happy but otherwise kept under strict lock and key. But this week, one of em has escaped and posted a buzzword on the arXiv without permission.

Charles “Manhat” Tahan is normally locked in the bowels of the Cavendish lab in Cambridge. Let loose, he is brayin’ that physicists are a-stuttering and a-stumblin for want of a word to describe technology that depends on quantum effects that have no classical counterpart. We’re talkin things like entanglement, coherence and superposition–the so-called spooky properties of quantum physics.

Manhat Tahan says the word we need is “spookytechnology”.

Whadaya’ll think? Don’t send no shivers down my spine, I gotta tell yer. Surely ya’ll can come up with something better for this kinda strange stuff. How about quantech or ungodly gear or maniacal machinery or EPR matter or subsubstance or whatever.

And then maybe, just maybe, we can persuade Manhat Tahan to get back into the dungeon before he does some real damage.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/0710.2537: Spookytechnology and Society

This entry was posted on Monday, October 22nd, 2007 at 5:30 pm and is filed under Buzzwords. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.