WHAT is a boojum? Is it: a particularly dangerous variety of snark; a bizarre cactus-like tree endemic to Baja California in Mexico; or a geometrical pattern sometimes seen on the surface of superfluid helium-3?
In fact it’s all three. Fans of Lewis Carroll will recall that in his poem , boojums are the most feared of all snarks. Meagre and hollow, but crisp-tasting beasts, they inhabit desolate valleys – a bit like the Mexican tree. Carroll’s boojums cause those who venture too close to “softly and suddenly vanish away” – a fate that also befalls helium’s superfluidity when a boojum appears.
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“Meagre and hollow, but crisp-tasting beasts, they inhabit desolate valleys”
The names have come about thanks to science’s long tradition of allowing individuals to name discoveries as they see fit. The Mexican succulent owes its moniker to the English-born botanist Godfrey Sykes. On spying his first example in 1922, he reportedly snorted, in the spirit of Carroll’s snark hunters, “Ho ho, a boojum!”
Stealth and guile
Half a century later, in an age less accommodating of eccentricity, physicist David Mermin of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, had to employ a good deal to establish his superfluid tribute to Carroll. Part of his motivation, he admits, was putting one over on journal editors, but he had a more constructive reason too: “It’s nice to have names for things that are suggestive,” he says.
These days, such considerations are rarely enough. The sheer profusion of things to be labelled and pigeon-holed means nomenclature is increasingly being standardised by flint-faced committees with little taste for whimsy. So is the colourful side of science itself softly vanishing away?
Admittedly, standardised nomenclature is nothing new. Plants are subject to one of the oldest standardised naming schemes – the binomial system established by Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century – and its regulatory framework, the International Code of Botanical Nomenclature, is a model of tolerance. “A legitimate name must not be rejected merely because it… is inappropriate or disagreeable,” states article 51.1. Despite this, botanists are rarely as idiosyncratic as Sykes when it comes to choosing official plant names. “There’s simply not much mileage in it,” says John MacNeill of the Royal Botanical Garden in Edinburgh, UK.
Sirius and Betelgeuse
Other disciplines are less relaxed. The International Astronomical Union (IAU), which is responsible for naming celestial objects, would happily get rid of the poetic but messy legacy of star names handed down from early astronomers and replace them with the kind of unique, concise numerical identifier now given to all newly discovered stars. Out with Sirius and Betelgeuse, and in with HR 2491 and HR 2061.
Killjoys? Not at all, they say. With the hundreds of millions of stars we now know of, using old-fashioned names would be unworkable. And for those who have taken up commercial offers to name a star or parcel of lunar real estate after their loved ones, the IAU has an : “Such ‘names’ have no formal or official validity whatever,” it says.
Geneticists also grapple with huge amounts of data. Ideally, human genes would have the same names as equivalent genes already discovered in other organisms. “We had particular problems with fruit-fly researchers,” says Sue Povey of University College London, who chaired from 1996 to 2007. “They were always giving their genes names like hedgehog.”
Sonic hedgehog
As memorable as such names are, they can prove problematical too. Take the mammalian gene Sonic hedgehog, which acquired its name from the related fruit-fly gene. It is now known to play a role in a developmental disorder of the brain known as holoprosencephaly. The name does not help when parents have to be told that a mutation in Sonic hedgehog has given rise to their baby’s potentially fatal condition.
“It would be nice to have a system for human genes that was stable, memorable and meaningful at the same time,” says Povey. But that’s impossible to achieve, and ultimately the need for stability – and searchability in gene databases – is winning out. The result is the unpronounceable alphanumeric jumble that is the typical gene name today.
It could be a metaphor for science: ever more complex, ever more impenetrable. The shift may be regrettable, but there is a general feeling that it is inevitable. “I slightly mourn the more whimsical names” says Povey, “but their time was past.”
The name game
BARF, dUMP, arsole, uranates, SEX
A sordid streak runs through chemistry. Some instances are straightforward to explain: the uranates are oxides of uranium; SEX is sodium ethyl xanthate. How 2′-deoxyuridine-5′-monophosphate reduces to dUMP, or tripentafluorophenylborane to BARF, is less clear. Arsole is a moderately aromatic ring molecule with the formula C4H5As.
Cheap date
The dubious coinages of researchers investigating genes of the vinegar fly Drosophila melanogaster are legion. Few are in more doubtful taste than cheap date – mutations in this gene give flies a heightened susceptibility to alcohol.
Axion
The strong nuclear force, unlike other fundamental forces, acts in the same way on most particles. To explain why, in 1977 Nobel prizewinner Frank Wilczek postulated a particle that he named after a washing powder being heavily marketed at the time. His reasoning was that his axions would “clean up” the problem. The detergent has since disappeared. The particle has never been found.
WIMPs
Diffidently hanging round somewhere outside the standard model of particle physics are the WIMPs – weakly interacting massive particles – which are postulated to make up a large portion of the universe’s missing dark matter. They are not to be confused with MACHOs, massive astrophysical compact halo objects, which can solve the dark matter problem without the WIMPs.
Phallus impudicus
The for the mushroom commonly known as the common stinkhorn reflects its unusual morphology and possibly its unpleasant aroma. Pre-Linnaean attempts were hardly any better: “pricke mushroom” or “fungus virilis penis effigie” were the names given by John Gerard in his General Historie of Plants of 1597.
Quark
Conventional accounts single out theorist Murray Gell-Mann as the originator of physicists’ peculiarly developed penchant for whimsy. Looking for a name in 1964 for a trio of particles he had postulated to make up protons and neutrons, he from the dream of a drunkard passed out in a Dublin tavern in James Joyce’s stream-of-consciousness novel Finnegans Wake: “three quarks for Muster Mark”. This unleashed a stream of strangely, charmingly and frankly bizarrely named particles.
Rowling, Takei and Rammstein
The International Astronomical Union is considerably more accommodating about the naming of than it is about stars, possibly as there aren’t so many of them. Celebrities honoured by having asteroids named after them include the author of the Harry Potter books, a Star Trek actor and a German industrial metal band.
Big bang
When he came up with the name “big bang”, astronomer Fred Hoyle achieved a singular feat: popularising a theory that he was trying to ridicule. Far from consigning to obscurity the idea that our universe exploded from nothing, the name has helped to cement it in the public imagination.
