Randall Munroe presents a tournament bracket for the cutest-named scientific effects at xkcd. You can fill in the winner of each bracket yourself to determine the overall champ. But what we really want to know is where all these cutesy names come from. Well, scientists are just people, after all, and they often have a sense of humor when it comes to naming things. However, these effects have legit names for legit reasons.
Some are named after something concrete that has to do with the effect, to make it memorable:
Hot chocolate effect (acoustics)
Cheerios effect (fluid dynamics)
Bouba/kiki effect (linguistics)
Cutaneous rabbit effect (perception)
Small firm effect (business)
Oddity effect (ichthyology)
Butterfly effect (weather)
Popcorn effect (electronics)
Others are named after the scientist(s) who described it:
YORP effect (astronomy)
Stroop effect (perception)
Pockels effect (electronics)
Perky effect (perception)
Little–Parks effect (electronics)
And some were named in some other way, which makes them well worth reading about:
Nocebo effect (the opposite of the placebo effect) The name is kind of a pun.
Dr. Fox effect (education) This was named after a fictional character used in the experiment.
Woozle effect (science journalism) Named after an imaginary character in the book Winnie-the-Pooh. They hang with Heffalumps.
At first I thought that the YORP effect would be a runaway winner, but then I read about all of these, and decided no one can beat the Woozle effect.
#science #sciencename #effects #RandallMunroe #xkcd