fluorine

Liquid fluorine in a cryogenic bath

26 August 2023

Fluorine is an element with the atomic number 9 and the symbol F. At room temperature and pressure, it is a highly toxic, yellow gas. In pure form, it is extremely reactive, interacting and corroding most substances it comes in contact with.

The name is a combination of fluor + -ine. The noun fluor is from Latin, where it means a discharge, flow, or stream. In English it can refer to any of a variety of minerals, resembling gems, that are used in smelting remove impurities and to facilitate the fusing of metals, a welding or soldering agent. The suffix -ine is used, among other things, in the names of classes or genera of natural objects; compare fluorine to the names of the elements in the same column of the periodic table: chlorine, bromine, iodine, astatine, and tennessine.

In 1546, Georgius Agricola, the “father of mineralogy,” used the Latin fluores to translate the German Flusse (fluxes) used in smelting. And by 1610, fluor was being used in English, in particular in Philmon Holland’s 1610 translation of William Camden’s Britannia. The word appears in a description of the mining industry in Darbyshire:

Milstones likewise are here hewed out, as also grinde-stones and whetstones, to giue an edge unto iron tooles: and sometimes in these mines and quarries is found a certaine white Fluor (for such stones coming of Mines, that bee like unto precious stones, learned minerall men call Fluores) which for all the world resembleth Christall.

The adjective fluoric, in the phrase fluoric acid, is in use by 1783, and by the late eighteenth century chemists began to suspect such compounds contained a novel element. Starting in 1809, chemists Humphry Davy and André Marie Ampère exchanged a series of letters on the topic, culminating in 1813 with Davy publishing a paper that named the element, crediting Ampere with the coinage:

From the general tenor of the results that I have stated, it appears reasonable to conclude that there exists in the fluoric compounds a peculiar substance, possessed of strong attractions for metallic bodies and hydrogen, and which combined with certain inflammable bodies forms peculiar acids, and which, in consequence of its strong affinities and high decomposing agencies, it will be very difficult to examine in a pure form, and, for the sake of avoiding circumlocution, it may be denominated fluorine, a name suggested to me by M. Ampere.

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Sources:

Camden, William. Britain, or a Chorographicall Description of the most Flourishing Kingdomes, England, Scotland, and Ireland, and the Ilands Adioyning. Philemon Holland, trans. London: George Bishop and John Norton, 1610, 556–557. Early English Books Online (EEBO).

Davy, Humphry. “Some Experiments and Observations on the Substances Produced in Different Chemical Processes on Fluor Spar” (8 July 1813). Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, 103, December 1813, 263–79 at 278. DOI: 10.1098/rstl.1813.0034.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements: Part 2—Turbulent Nineteenth Century.” Foundations of Chemistry, 8 December 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09451-w.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2012, s.v. fluorine, n., fluor, n.1, fluoric, adj., fluoric acid, n.; second edition, 1989, s.v. -ine, suffix1.

Image credit: B.G. Mueller, 2011. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

quark

James Joyce, 1915 (left) and Murray Gell-Mann, 2012 (right)

23 August 2023

A quark is a subatomic particle that combine in pairs to form hadrons, the basic constituents of matter. The name is an arbitrary coinage inspired by a passage in James Joyce’s 1939 novel Finnegans Wake.

The word was coined by physicist Murray Gell-Man in a 1964 paper:

A simpler and more elegant scheme can be constructed if we allow non-integral values for the charges. We can dispense entirely with the basic baryon b if we assign to the triplet t the following properties: spin ½, z = ˗⅓, and baryon number ⅓. We then refer to the members u⅔, d ˗⅓, and s ˗⅓ of the triplet as “quarks”⁶ q and the members of the anti-triplet as anti-quarks ˗q. Baryons can now be constructed from quarks by using the combinations (q q q), (q q q ˗q), etc., while mesons are made out of (q ˗q), (q q ˗q ˗q), etc.

The note (#6) is to James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, in particular to a line in a poem that appears at the opening of the novel’s book 2, episode 4:

—THREE QUARKS for Muster Mark!
Sure he hasn’t got much of a bark
And sure any he has it’s all beside the mark.
But O, Wreneagle Almighty, wouldn’t un be a sky of a lark
To see that old buzzard whooping about for uns shirt in the dark
And he hunting round for uns speckled trousers around by Palmerstown Park?
Hohohoho, moulty Mark!
You’re the rummest old rooster ever flopped out of a Noah’s ark
And you think you’re cock of the wark.
Fowls, up! Tristy’s the spry young spark
That’ll tread her and wed her and bed her and red her
Without ever winking the tail of a feather
And that’s how that chap’s going to make his money and mark!
 
Overhoved, shrillgleescreaming. That song sang seaswans. The winging ones. Seahawk, seagull, curlew and plover, kestrel and capercallzie. All the birds of the sea they trolled out rightbold when they smacked the big kuss of Trustan with Usolde.

The poem is, among other things, a reference to Arthurian legend. The Mark in question is King Mark of Cornwall, the “Cuckold King,” uncle to Tristan, who had an affair with Mark’s wife, Iseult. Joyce’s quark is probably an imitation of sea-bird’s call. Quark can also be a type of cheese similar to cottage cheese, but this makes little sense in Joyce’s context.

On its face, the passage has no relation to particle physics, but Gell-Mann explained his reasoning in a 27 June 1978 letter to the editors of the OED:

I employed the sound “quork” for several weeks in 1963 before noticing “quark” in “Finnegans Wake,” which I had perused from time to time since it appeared in 1939 [...] The allusion to three quarks seemed perfect [...] I needed an excuse for retaining the pronunciation quork despite the occurrence of “Mark,” “bark,” “mark,” and so forth in Finnegans Wake. I found that excuse by supposing that one ingredient of the line “Three quarks for Muster Mark” was a cry of “Three quarts for Mister…” heard in H. C. Earwicker's pub.

Quarks come in six types, arranged in three pair (up/down, charm/strange, top/bottom), and that struck Gell-Mann as sufficient justification for using the word as the name of the subatomic particle. The word stuck, but Gell-Mann’s preferred pronunciation did not.

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Sources:

Gell-Mann, M. “A Schematic Model of Baryons and Mesons.” Physics Letters, 8.3, 1 February 1964, 214/2. Elsevier Science Direct.

Joyce, James. Finnegans Wake. New York: Viking Press, 1939. 2.4, 383.

Merriam-Webster. “What Does ‘Quark’ Have to Do with Finnegans Wake?” Words at Play.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2007, s.v. quark, n.2., quawk, n.

Image credits: James Joyce: Alex Ehrenzweig, 1915, Wikimedia Commons, public domain image; Murray Gell-Mann: Melirius, 2012, Wikimedia Commons, licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

big endian / little endian / middle endian

A chicken egg

21 August 2023

Big-, little-, and middle endian are adjectives denoting ways to sequence data. A big-endian system places the most significant bit or digit at the beginning, a little-endian one places it at the end, and a middle-endian system puts it in the middle. Knowing the distinction has important implications for computer and information system design. The distinction is perhaps most easily explained using dates. A big-endian date places the year first, followed by the month then day: 20230821. A little-endian scheme reverses that order, putting the day first: 21082023 or 21 August 2023. And a middle-endian system mixes it up: 08212023 or August 21, 2023.

Big endian and little endian were coined by computer scientist Danny Cohen in a 1 April 1980 paper:

This is an attempt to stop a war. I hope it is not too late and that somehow, magically perhaps, peace will prevail again.

The latecomers into the arena believe that the issue is: “What is the proper byte order in messages?”. [sic]

The root of the conflict lies much deeper than that. It is the question of which bit should travel first, the bit from the little end of the word, or the bit from the big end of the word? The followers of the former approach are called the Little-Endians, and the followers of the latter are called the Big-Endians. The details of the holy war between the Little-Endians and the Big-Endians are documented in [Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver’s Travel (sic). Unknown publisher, 1726.] and described, in brief, in the Appendix. I recommend that you read it at this point.

As Cohen notes, his names were inspired by Jonathan Swift’s 1726 novel Gulliver’s Travels. In the novel, Swift describes a religious war between the people of the islands of Lilliput and Blefuscu over which end of an egg to break before eating it, the big end or the little end:

During the Course of these Troubles, the Emperors of Blefuscu did frequently expostulate by their Embassadors, accusing us of making a Schism in Religion, by offending against a fundamental Doctrine of our great Prophet Lustrog, in the fifty-fourth Chapter of the Blundecral, (which is their Alcoran.) This, however, is thought to be a meer Strain upon the Text: For the Words are these; That all true Believers shall break their Eggs at the convenient End: and which is the convenient End, seems, in my humble Opinion, to be left to every Man’s Conscience, or at least in the power of the Chief Magistrate to determine. Now, the Big-Endian Exiles have found so much Credit in the Emperor of Blefuscu’s Court, and so much private assistance and Encouragement from their Party here at home, that a bloody War hath been carried on between the two Empires for six and thirty Moons with various Success.

Note that Swift only used the term Big-Endian in his novel.

Nor did Cohen use the term middle endian. That term was coined later. The earliest use I have found is in a Usenet post from 27 December 1998, but I’m sure antedatings can be found:

It seemed resonable [sic] to me to to have MSB at the left and LSB at the right. Obviously this wasn't so for others so, which was natural for you and what influences were operating on h/w designers to influence the final result as big/middle/little endian?

MSB/LSB = most/least significant bit.

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Sources:

Cohen, Danny. “On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace.” Internet Engineering Notes 137, 1 April 1980.

Lamb, C. “Big, Little and Middle Endian-ness.” Usenet: alt.folklore.computers, 27 December 1998.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2008, s.v. big-endian, n. and adj.; September 2014, s.v. little-endian, n. and adj.; December 2012, s.v. small-endian, n. and adj.

Swift, Jonathan [Lemuel Gulliver, pseud.]. Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, vol. 1 of 4. London: Benjamin Motte, 1726, 74–75. Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO).

Image credit: Sun Ladder, 2009. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

flerovium

Russian postal stamp celebrating the 100th anniversary of Georgy Flerov’s birth and the naming of element 114 after the laboratory named for him

18 August 2023

Flerovium is an artificially created element with atomic number 114 and symbol Fl. Flerovium isotopes have half-lives less than two seconds, although more stable forms have been theorized. Only some ninety flerovium atoms have been produced and detected, so the element obviously has no practical uses beyond research. It was first synthesized in 1998 at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR) in Dubna, Russia, in collaboration with scientists from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in the United States.

The element is named after the Flerov* Laboratory of JINR. The laboratory itself is named for physicist Georgy Flerov (1913–90). Flerovium had been previously proposed as a name for a number of other elements, including element 102 (nobelium) before IUPAC approved it for element 114.

The proposed name, along with that of element 116 (livermorium), was announced at the closing ceremony of the International Year of Chemistry held in Brussels on 1 December 2011. The JINR’s press release about the naming of 2 December 2011 reads, in part:

With Professor Yuri Oganessian as spokesperson the collaborators have proposed the name flerovium (symbol Fl) for element number 114 and the name livermorium (symbol Lv) for that with number 116. […]

Both of the names proposed lie within the long tradition of the choice of names for elements. The proposal for 114 will honour the Flerov Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions where the superheavy elements are synthesised. Georgiy N. Flerov (1913 – 1990) is recognised as a renowned physicist, author of the discovery of the spontaneous fission of uranium (1940, with Konstantin A. Petrzhak), pioneer in heavy-ion physics; and founder in the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research the Laboratory of Nuclear Reactions (1957).

The names of both elements were officially approved by the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) the following year.

*The name Флёров is perhaps more accurately transliterated as Flyorov, but I’ve maintained the Flerov spelling here because it is the more usual transliteration and for consistency with the spelling of the element’s name.

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Sources:

Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR). “Names Proposed for Elements of Atomic Number 114 and 116” (press release), 2 December 2011.

Miśkowiec, Pawel. “Name Game: The Naming History of the Chemical Elements—Part 3—Rivalry of Scientists in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries.” Foundations of Chemistry, 12 November 2022. DOI: 10.1007/s10698-022-09452-9.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2016, s.v. flerovium, n.

Image credit: MARKA Publishing & Trading Centre, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image

comet

Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF), 1 February 2023

16 August 2023

A comet is a solar-system object consisting of a nucleus of ice and dust, which sublimates into a “tail” when its orbit takes it close to the sun. Short-period comets, those with orbital periods less than two hundred years, originate in the Kuiper belt, while long-period comets are thought to originate in the Oort cloud.

The word comet has a straightforward etymology. It was borrowed into Old English from the Latin cometa, which in turn comes from the Greek κομήτης (komete, long-haired), short for ἀστὴῤ κομήτης (aster kometes, long-haired star). The word’s use in English was subsequently reinforced by the Anglo-Norman comete.

The following is the account of the return of Halley’s Comet in the year 1066 that appears in the Worcester Chronicle:

Portion of the Bayeux Tapestry depicting the sighting of Halley’s Comet in 1066

MLXVI. On þissum geare com Harold cyng of Eoferwic to Westmynstre · to þam Eastran · þe wæron þa Eastran on þone dæg XVI. K[alends] Mai. Þa wearð geond eall England swylc taken on heofenum gesewen swylce nan man ær ne geseah. Sume men cwedon þ[æt] hit cometa se steorra wære · þone sume men hatað þone fæxedon steorran · & he ateowde ærest on þone æfen Letania Maior · VIII. K[alends] Mai · & swa scan ealle þa seofan niht.

(1066. In this year King Harold came from York to Westminster at Easter, which was the Easter then on the sixteenth Kalends of May [16 April]. Then was seen over all England such a sign in the heavens as no man had ever seen before. Some men said that the star was a comet, that some men call the hairy star, and it first appeared on the eve of Litania major, the eighth Kalends of May [24 April]. And it shone all the seven nights.)

Since antiquity, the appearance of a comet has been thought to be an omen of a momentous event or disaster. And in 1066 for once, that turned out to be the case.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2007, s.v. comete, n.

Dictionary of Old English: A to I, 2018, s.v. cometa, n.

Middle English Dictionary, 2019, s.v. comete, n.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, June 2017, s.v. comet, n.

Thorpe, Benjamin, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, vol. 1 of 2. London: Longman, Green Longman, and Roberts, 1861, 336. HathiTrust Digital Library. London. British Library, Cotton MS Tiberius B.iv.

Image credits: Comet C/2022 E3 (ZTF): David Wilton, 2023. This photo is licensable under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Bayeux Tapestry: Myrabella, 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Public domain image.