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words Coming to terms Caloric, cathode, curium and quark — coinage from the mint of science. request for terms to describe his experiments J. L. Heilbron in electrolysis, Whewell supplied anode, mong the obstacles to the steady cathode, electrode and ion from non- advance of science are the words committal Greek roots. He gave names to Ainvented to denote its conquests. experimenters too, ‘scientist’ and ‘physicist’ Francis Bacon rated poor terminology as the for example; however, they had too much of most menacing of the four sets of idols he the market-place about them (they came too defined in his Novum organum of 1620 as close to ‘dentist’) for the ‘men of science’ they befuddlers of the human mind. Badly coined were supposed to designate. words, the “Idols of the Market Place”, Whewell’s criteria guided the choice of thoughtless phrases minted for the moment, terminology in the established sciences until “wonderfully obstruct the understanding”. the First World War. His use of ancient The incautious wordsmith of science can languages and his conviction that the right “throw all into confusion, and lead men into words would establish correct and durable numberless empty controversies”. concepts fit his age perfectly. Most of the The history of scientific terminology people whom he wanted to call scientists opens a royal road to the history of scientific knew some Latin and Greek; and they and culture. The eighteenth century, which spent he built as if their constructions would be much of its intellectual energy classifying in use for ever. and summarizing its burgeoning knowledge, In competition with Whewell’s rules of devised terminology that transformed art, the later nineteenth century began the botany and chemistry. The binomial designa- practice, in keeping with the growing tion of natural species introduced by nationalism of the time, of naming chemical Linnaeus and the systematic names of elements and electrical standards after a dis- chemical compounds invented by Lavoisier coverer, the country of the discoverer, or a The first systematic naming was Adam’s task of and his collaborators remain in use, although national hero. In chemistry, the introduction finding names for the creatures God had made. they are not free from damaging idolatry. of the new style can be traced to the 1870s Linnaeus embedded his binomials in a and 1880s, when the discoverers of gallium, is an inspired put-on: it looks Greek, means system of arithmetically defined taxa that germanium and scandium named them nothing in German, puns in English and sometimes put species in the wrong families. after their nationalities (French, German, satisfies Bacon’s requirement that a word The French chemists admitted the substance Swedish). During the twentieth century, express a clear and distinct idea. caloric, which does not exist, among their nationalistic names attained the detail of a The earliest case of systematic naming LIBRARY PICTURE EVANS MARY elements, and coined ‘oxygen’ on the mistak- postal address (berkeleyum, californium, occurred about 6,000 years ago, when God en idea that the gas so designated gave acids americium). The names of heroes, invoked brought all his newly fashioned creatures to their acidity. But the terminology, erected to distinguish electrical standards during the Adam, “to see what he would call them” on the enlightened principles of rationality, late nineteenth century (ohm, amp, volt ...), (Gen. 2:19). That eases the task: one Provider order and universality, proved flexible invaded the periodic table a century later of instances, one namer of names. Genetics enough to drop erroneous reifications (like (curium, fermium, mendelevium ...). and molecular biology have had a great many caloric) and ignore misnomers (like oxygen). After the Second World War, Americans of both and, consequently, a taxing and In the nineteenth century, geology, gained by priority of discovery the right to awkward terminology. Students of fruitflies palaeontology and physics enlarged their name the elementary particles. Their termi- favour bouncy names in the style of particle vocabularies with the help of William nology tended to be facetious and jocular. physicists: armadillo, hedgehog, lost-in-space. Whewell, a veritable mint of new coinages. Thus, quarks in their various flavours and Mouse geneticists like dull ones, such as He did not try for grand systems, however, colours; gluons to paste quarks together; b-catenin, which happens to be the same but for small groups of linked words that quantum chromodynamics, which does not gene as armadillo. A single gene (selectin L) would convey concepts without fixing study colour; and GUTs and TOEs, not body has 15 different aliases, whereas MT1 refers theories. In response to Michael Faraday’s parts but Grand Unified Theories and Theo- to at least 11 different genes (see Nature 411, ries of Everything. Did the jocularity indicate 631–632; 2001). the easy confidence of people who felt close The cure for this genetic disorder is a he playful names to finishing physics? It certainly demonstrat- computer, which identifies a gene not by ed that the sober conservatism of European its name but by systematic descriptors. The Tcoined by high- scientists of the nineteenth and early twenti- new Adam condones local and multiple eth centuries had given way to the flippant names for fundamental entities of science energy physicists have equality of Americans during their time of and undercuts the principle of univocal been criticized as world dominance. The playful names coined universality that has informed scientific by high-energy physicists have been criti- terminology since the Enlightenment. A inelegant, capricious cized as inelegant, non-ancient, capricious perfect post-modernist solution. ■ and misleading. No doubt it is unlucky that J. L. Heilbron is at Worcester College, Oxford and misleading. quark means garbage in German, but gluon OX1 2HB, UK. NATURE | VOL 415 | 7 FEBRUARY 2002 | www.nature.com © 2002 Macmillan Magazines Ltd 585.

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