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who was the fool who was tasked with naming the galaxy and the only adjective they could think of was ‘mmmmmmmmmmmmilky…’
scientist: (gazing up at space)
scientist: ……….. it sure is a milky boyNO
YOU DONT UNDERSTAND
ASTRONOMERS ARE THE SHITTIEST EVER AT NAMING THINGS I KID YOU NOT.
When it came time to name the two theoretical particle types that might be dark matter THEY INTENTIONALLY CHOSE THE NAMES SO THAT THE ACRONYMS WOULD SPELL “WIMPS” AND “MACHOS” I SHIT YOU NOT
THEY ARE FUCKING TERRIBLE AT NAMING ANYTHING
I just listened to a talk by Neil deGrasse Tyson himself LAST NIGHT and he went on about this more than once.
“I’m walking down the street and I’m like ‘ooh pretty rock…’ and some Geologist is like ‘actually, that’s anorthosite feldspar’ and I’m like ‘Nevermind, I don’t want it anymore.’ Any biologists in the audience? [some clapping] Yeah, you know what I’m talking about. The most important molecule in the human body, what did you name it? It has NINE SYLLABLES and it’s so long that even YOU GUYS abbreviate it as ‘DNA’!
But astrophysicists and astronomers? No, man, we call it like we see it. Star made of neutrons? NEUTRON STAR. Small white star? WHITE DWARF. You know that big red spot on Jupiter? Know what we called it? JUPITER’S RED SPOT.”
my favourite one is rocks which they mis-identify as meteorites but then turn out to just be regular rocks,
they are called meteor-wrongs
What is that? It’s like a star just collapsed in on itself to nothingness… it’s a “Collapsar”. Well, now it just looks like a black hole in the sky. Ok, now let’s call it a “Black Hole”. There’s something singularly odd about how it bends light and won’t emit it…. Ok, so call it a fucking “Singularity”….!
I love this
isn’t it weird that we have one hand that knows how to do everything and then one hand that just sits there like “I don’t know how to hold a pencil”