• Question: Where do all the science things get their names?

    Asked by 255furk43 to Chris, Joanne, Kathryn, Kieran, Sarah on 7 Nov 2017.
    • Photo: Kathryn Schoenrock

      Kathryn Schoenrock answered on 7 Nov 2017:

      many names come from a Latin or Roman root that describes the task, experiment, or maybe animal.

      Ex: A fern named after lady gaga because of its DNA sequence (GAGAGAGAGA)

      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaga_(plant)

    • Photo: Sarah Guerin

      Sarah Guerin answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      In physics lots of things are named after the scientist that discovered them- like Curie, Tesla, Mendeleev, and Newton.

    • Photo: Chris Werner

      Chris Werner answered on 8 Nov 2017:

      Most physics derived things are from famous scientists like Sarah mentioned. Most things in biology are named in roman or Latin, like the dinosaurs and everything living today. Our species is homosapien which means wise man, and the great white shark is Carcharodon carcharias.

      Then sometimes people just get really bored in naming things, physics in particular due to the number of types of particles. Like quarks, which make up protons. I’d love to meet the person who claimed the discovery of the up, down, left and right quarks!!!

      Physics acronyms are also daft and unimaginative at times, such as;

      YORIC Yet another Optimal Resolution Image Constructor

      from this site https://www.cfa.harvard.edu/~gpetitpas/Links/Astroacro.html

      Its named the DOOFAAS list, the Dumb Or Overly Forced Astronomical Acronyms Site…need I say anymore

    • Photo: Joanne Duffy

      Joanne Duffy answered on 12 Nov 2017:

      In biology, naming things follows something super fancy called “Linnean binomial classification”. This just means that there are two names given to every species, the first one is its “genus” and the second one is the “species”. A guy called Carl Linneus came up with the system, hence its name. So the order of things in biology goes like this:
      Species – Genus – Family – Order – Class – Phylum – Kingdom – Domain.

      You know humans are called Homo sapiens for example. In this name, Homo is the genus, and sapiens is the species. If you’re writing by hand, you always have the genus starting with a capital letter and you underline both the genus and the species. If you’re typing, you put them in italics, but I’m not able to do that in this answer box!

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