Monday, February 07, 2005

Fermi and Bose walk into a bar...

Continuing to beat a theme to death, I'm ashamed to admit that as a physicist I had forgotten two words (common in physics anyway) that derive from proper names: "fermion" (Enrico Fermi) and "boson" (S.N. Bose). For the interested, the former describes a particle that posseses half-integer spin and obeys Fermi-Dirac statistics and the later describes a particle with integer spin that obeys Bose-Einstein statistics. In music, to match this duo, there are also "saxophone" (Adolphe Sax) and "sousaphone" (John Philip Sousa). In fashion, there is the facial hair contribution of Anthony Van Dyck (Vandyke) with "vandyke" and Henry Havelock's contribution to headware: the "havelock".

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