psychoceramics: the unbearable weirdness of physics

[Mitchell Porter <qix @ desire.apana.org.au>]

For some reason, sci.physics attracts more kooks than anywhere else on Usenet.
And yet the ideas which are offered up by new thinkers there really don't 
compete in weirdness with those of established theory, with the exception
of Plutonium Atom Totality. Even the terminology rarely matches the real
thing; as acb has pointed out,

  Pseudoscience uses a lot of long, pretentious-sounding words, like 
  "resonation", "harmonic" and "ionisation". Real science uses a lot of
  silly words like "beable", "slepton" and "P-brane".

This is the latest example of silly physics nomenclature I've seen:

Paper: hep-th/9512061
Title: Rusty Scatter Branes
Authors: R.R. Khuri and R.C. Myers
  We derive double dimensional reduction/oxidation in a framework where it is
applicable to describe general non-static (and anisotropic) $p$-brane
solutions. Given this procedure, we are able to relate the dynamical
interaction potential for parallel extremal $p$-branes in $D$ dimensions to
that for extremal black holes in $D-p$ dimensions. In particular, we find that
to leading order the potential vanishes for all $\kappa$-symmetric $p$-branes.

A "p-brane" is a "p-dimensional membrane", a fundamental object with p internal
dimensions. (Particles are 0-branes, strings are 1-branes.)

Dimensional reduction is the process in which the effective dimensionality
of a space-time decreases, as space "curls up" in several directions.
Dimensional oxidation (a truly terrible pun) is the reverse process.

-mitch
http://desire.apana.org.au/~qix

"After years and years of super-ware and "theories of everything",
which explained absolutely nothing new, physicists have become the 
kooks and the crackpots of the scientific world."
-Anil Trivedi (t--@w--.uchicago.edu), writing on sci.physics