Warp wrote:
> embraces and promotes the use of descriptive, mundane and even funny names
> in physics, especially compared to the cryptic and technical names used 

Sure. But "big bang" is descriptive. "WIMP" is almost descriptive. "MACHO" 
is obviously a tortured acronym to go along with WIMP.

Calling quarks "charmed" and "strange" and "beauty" is another example. 
Sure, there's probably no good name for those anyway (as in, they don't 
correspond to anything that might suggest a name), so picking a meaningless 
word that isn't easy to confuse with anything else is really quite reasonable.

But when your competing theory has a particle called WIMP, and you make your 
particle's acronym MACHO, you're just being silly. :-)  It's as bad as XNA 
one-upping GNU.

-- 
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
   Serving Suggestion:
     "Don't serve this any more. It's awful."

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