natural phenomena should be not named after people

[Alex Powell]

At present time every scientificly interested person is facing a gigantic sophisticated ready-to-immerse body of knowledge - happy times for all inquisitives.

 

Unfortunately, there is a huge terminological problem around, namely that a relevant amount of natural phenomena or scientific laws are foolishly named after people's names, instead of been well classified into a solid consistent terminology of their respective area of science.

At least in my view, depicted situation massivly hinders people to get right into adequate conceptual thinking about nature on a deep scale.

If one like to think deeply about molecular biology, common rules of motion, black holes, QED, nature of spacetime, matter or energy - why he should bother about and bear in mind dozens of names of real people of history, who already walked along these topics too? And what has Newton to do with force measurings, Lorenz with relativity effects, Lagrange with motions of orbits or Alzheimer with brain diseases in the first place? Yes, they helped menkind to get the knowledge, but nature itself does not depend on consciousness beings, to work as it works.

Science is about discovering things as they "really" are or at least to approximate own understanding as close to reality as possible. Assumed that reality exists and I want to understand some details, I'm pretty sure those details do not depend on people, who discovered them.

My approach would be to honour scientific progress by some kind of "hall of fame" , which should be well-known to everybody. And when every worthy person landed there, there would be a renaming task left over, namely to rename all eponymous terms, related to real natural phenomena.

Is there already some work / effort known to public on that topic?

 

P.S.
Sorry for my inconsistent english, i'm not native.

 

 

Edited July 11, 2018 by Alex Powell

[Strange]

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

Unfortunately, there is a huge terminological problem around, namely that a relevant amount of natural phenomena or scientific laws are foolishly named after people's names, instead of been well classified into a solid consistent terminology of their respective area of science.

I would say it is a relatively small set of things that are named after people. And these are usually things like the equations they developed to describe something. For example, we have "general relativity" (not named after a person) which is a good model of gravity and how the universe evolves. The equations that define how GR works are named after the person who developed them, though (the Einstein Field Equations).

But its worse than you think. Most things are named after the wrong person: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigler's_law_of_eponymy

But I don't see why the names we use matter. And you can usually avoid them. For example, you can refer to "the laws of motion" instead of "Newton's laws of motion".

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

If one like to think deeply about molecular biology, common rules of motion, black holes, QED, nature of spacetime, matter or energy - why he should bother about and bear in mind dozens of names of real people of history

You just named several fields of study and natural phenomena without using any people's names. So it isn't really a problem.

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

Science is about discovering things as they "really" are

No. It is about creating useful models. Sometimes these models renamed after someone, and sometimes they aren't.

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

there would be a renaming task left over, namely to rename all eponymous terms, related to real natural phenomena.

Language evolves naturally. I don't think you have much chance of changing it. You could introduce new, invented names for things, but people would continue to use the names they are familiar with.

[Markus Hanke]

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

At least in my view, depicted situation massivly hinders people to get right into adequate conceptual thinking about nature on a deep scale.

I didn’t perceive it as a hindrance at all. What difference does it make what name you give a certain concept/model/idea/theory? That’s like saying a certain street shouldn’t have the name it does, but should have a different name, so that people can traverse it more readily. 

7 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

Is there already some work / effort known to public on that topic?

I doubt that, because it is a complete non-issue. Why would anyone waste time to go back and amend thousands upon thousands of textbooks, articles and other publications just for the sake of inserting different names for some concepts? Truth be told, our time is better spent advancing our knowledge of the world.

[John Cuthber]

10 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

a relevant amount of natural phenomena or scientific laws are foolishly named after people's names, instead of been well classified into a solid consistent terminology of their respective area of science.

OK, So when they discovered Brownian motion, they didn't know what it was.

How could they classify it?
What would they have called it in the mean time?

So, your suggestion seems to be unwieldy, and solves a non-problem.

Why bother with it?

[studiot]

4 minutes ago, John Cuthber said:

Why bother with it?

That's a good point, John.

However the process can go too far the other way.

What was wrong with Webers per square metre or Newtons per square metre?

I think that to be somewhat more demonstrative than the nonsense they have nowadays.

Edited July 12, 2018 by studiot

[swansont]

Naming phenomena also gets you awful, punny names like bosenova. Optical molasses isn't so bad, and magneto-optical trap is downright technically descriptive.

I don't see the problem with naming things after people. Doesn't really bother me.

[John Cuthber]

As far as I can tell, the OP is on about "things" rather than units.

 

Essentially all names of things- gravity, electricity etc- are arbitrary. Using the discoverer's name is as good an arbitrary choice as any.

The name of barbituric acid is, at least a bit more interesting
"There are several stories about how the substance got its name. The most likely story is that Baeyer and his colleagues went to celebrate their discovery in a tavern where the town's artillery garrison were also celebrating the feast of Saint Barbara – the patron saint of artillerymen. An artillery officer is said to have christened the new substance by amalgamating Barbara with urea.^[25] Another story holds that Baeyer synthesized the substance from the collected urine of a Munich waitress named Barbara"
(From WIKI)

 

[Sensei]

Quote

natural phenomena should be not named after people

In chemistry process of production of certain chemicals is named after people who the first one used their process. It's much easier to say what you have on mind using "Haber process" than having to say "process in which ammonia is produced from gaseous Nitrogen from air and Hydrogen from methane".. calling it "process of production of ammonia" is not enough to describe it, as there is many different ways to do it.

12 hours ago, Alex Powell said:

My approach would be to honour scientific progress by some kind of "hall of fame" , which should be well-known to everybody.

There is existing such "hall of fame". Nobel prize laureates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates

 

[Alex Powell]

On 7/12/2018 at 8:39 AM, Strange said:

On 7/12/2018 at 12:59 AM, Alex Powell said:

Science is about discovering things as they "really" are

No. It is about creating useful models. 

Why you cut off half of the sentence and thus alter the meaning of the whole statement? Would everybody act like that we shall get nowhere.

First of all, there are different fields of science, and not all of them just only "create useful models",

secondly you will notice the quotiation marks around the word "really" so that could be a clue, not to take it literaly (a simple semantic convention you should be aware of)

thirdly just perceive the rest of the tore-apart-sentence.

Finally it is the curiosity about the "real" world (note again the quotiation marks) that drives people (who do science) after all.

[Strange]

3 minutes ago, Alex Powell said:

Why you cut off half of the sentence and thus alter the meaning of the whole statement? Would everybody act like that we shall get nowhere.

First of all, there are different fields of science, and not all of them just only "create useful models",

secondly you will notice the quotiation marks around the word "really" so that could be a clue, not to take it literaly (a simple semantic convention you should be aware of)

thirdly just perceive the rest of the tore-apart-sentence.

Finally it is the curiosity about the "real" world (note again the quotiation marks) that drives people (who do science) after all.

Fair comment. I apologise if I misunderstood and misrepresented what you said.

[Strange]

There is a proposal to rename Hubble's Law to ... the Hubble-Lemaître Law: 

https://theconversation.com/game-changing-resolution-whose-name-on-the-laws-of-physics-for-an-expanding-universe-102099

[CharonY]

On 7/11/2018 at 4:59 PM, Alex Powell said:

Alzheimer with brain diseases in the first place

Well, this is a good example why the community comes up with such names. The issue here is that originally the symptoms were described by Alzheimer (sometime in the early 20th century). The big issue is that it was (and still is) not quite clear what caused the symptoms. You will find similar reasons throughout biology. Someone has an empirical finding, but the underlying mechanisms are unclear. As such it is not even theoretically possible to use an unified nomenclature. 

Also note that many names (regardless whether it is named after a person or not) often emerge in literature in a meme-like fashion. E.g. someone may start to referring to a disease "as described by so-and-so" which eventually could be changed to "so-and-so's disease" (whether they like it or not). In more recent times I think the trend has been moving away from naming things after persons. One of the reasons (I think) is because the scientific community has grown so large that it is often not common to contribute major findings to a particular person (with the exception of some niches).

[OldChemE]

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the OP.  When I taught high school physics it always bothered me that the SI units-- while inherently easy to use, were clouded by the naming-- which made it more difficult for the students to grasp their significance.    We confuse the students with Newtons when we mean kg-m/second squared, Joules when we mean kg meters squared per second squared.  This makes the learning process more difficult when we are faced with a problem where the inputs are in basic units like kg, m , s.  Yes, it can be learned, but it makes in inherently clean system of units cloudy.

[John Cuthber]

18 minutes ago, OldChemE said:

I'm somewhat sympathetic to the OP.  When I taught high school physics it always bothered me that the SI units-- while inherently easy to use, were clouded by the naming-- which made it more difficult for the students to grasp their significance.    We confuse the students with Newtons when we mean kg-m/second squared, Joules when we mean kg meters squared per second squared.  This makes the learning process more difficult when we are faced with a problem where the inputs are in basic units like kg, m , s.  Yes, it can be learned, but it makes in inherently clean system of units cloudy.

Is your torque wrench calibrated in Joules?

[Eise]

On 9/13/2018 at 11:52 PM, Strange said:

There is a proposal to rename Hubble's Law to ... the Hubble-Lemaître Law: 

https://theconversation.com/game-changing-resolution-whose-name-on-the-laws-of-physics-for-an-expanding-universe-102099

I am in... But I assume my voice does not count. I really Lemaître, his discoveries, and his position against the Pope when he proclaimed that the Big Bang was proof of the Creation.

[michel123456]

On 7/12/2018 at 1:59 AM, Alex Powell said:

At present time every scientificly interested person is facing a gigantic sophisticated ready-to-immerse body of knowledge - happy times for all inquisitives.

 

Unfortunately, there is a huge terminological problem around, namely that a relevant amount of natural phenomena or scientific laws are foolishly named after people's names, instead of been well classified into a solid consistent terminology of their respective area of science.

At least in my view, depicted situation massivly hinders people to get right into adequate conceptual thinking about nature on a deep scale.

If one like to think deeply about molecular biology, common rules of motion, black holes, QED, nature of spacetime, matter or energy - why he should bother about and bear in mind dozens of names of real people of history, who already walked along these topics too? And what has Newton to do with force measurings, Lorenz with relativity effects, Lagrange with motions of orbits or Alzheimer with brain diseases in the first place? Yes, they helped menkind to get the knowledge, but nature itself does not depend on consciousness beings, to work as it works.

Science is about discovering things as they "really" are or at least to approximate own understanding as close to reality as possible. Assumed that reality exists and I want to understand some details, I'm pretty sure those details do not depend on people, who discovered them.

My approach would be to honour scientific progress by some kind of "hall of fame" , which should be well-known to everybody. And when every worthy person landed there, there would be a renaming task left over, namely to rename all eponymous terms, related to real natural phenomena.

Is there already some work / effort known to public on that topic?

 

P.S.
Sorry for my inconsistent english, i'm not native.

 

 

From the title I expected you to talk about hurricanes naming, not about Newton's laws.