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Comment by perl4ever | Hacker News Reader

Every now and then I read some far-out scientific paper, and I'm pretty sure it's real, but I get fascinated with the question of how I really know that it's not pseudo-science by some crank.

Example:

"In this section, we investigate the band structures of plasmonic ribbons with four types of boundary conditions, i.e. zigzag, bearded zigzag, armchair, and bearded armchair"

(from "The existence of topological edge states in honeycomb plasmonic lattices")

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A real crank would try to use professional-sounding language, only someone completely secure in their field would call sometime a "bearded armchair." ;)

naming things is hard.

I now have this mental image of the author sat there for three hours trying to come up with a name, and then just exploding with "fuckit! I don't care what it's called! It doesn't matter. I was sat in an armchair when I thought of it, so armchair it is! If they can have strange quarks, I can have armchairs"

A real smart crank is aware of this and because he only spends time on cranking this was the riddle he made. Not many academics would be confident enough to call this man on his bullshit.

Physicists are amazing in coming up with names, from WIMPs (Weakly interacting massive particles) to something like Nuclear Pasta[1], with all sorts of culinary phases.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_pasta#Phases

My personal favourite is the 'barn', an area approximately the size of the face of a uranium nucleus, invented to covertly describe a large-ish target size to hit (the 'broad side of a barn') with a particle beam.

Maybe, I'm guessing, when you're at such a niche area of science like topological edge states in honeycomb plasmonic lattices you've got to double back to calling things simple shit in name-pairs just to keep everyone onboard.

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