The Bishop Sankey Diagram
Jan
07
2015
January 7, 2015
Or, my best pun ever:
If you like hip hop and you want to laugh, check out this thing I made.
Otherwise, please move along.
The Large Hadron Collider is a marvel of modern technology. It is also an endless source of juvenile amusement, since the word "hadron" is very similar to "hardon". The Large Hadron Collider was built by the European research organization CERN ("CERN" means "science" in European). At CERN's official website, there are currently 141 articles which mistakenly use the word "hardon" instead of "hadron". The first result is the title of one poor guy's PhD thesis.
I like to read old scientific papers. They give me a broader perspective on how things became as they are today. So when I came across this paper from 1977 in the reference list of a more recent paper, I knew I had to read it. Unfortunately, even with my university-provided access to most journals and most certainly to a journal like Nature, the evil overlords at Nature Publishing Group do not include papers as old as from 1977 in our site license. So I had to send a request to the library and wait a few days for someone to scan in a copy of the paper and email it to me, a relatively minor inconvenience.
In the mean time, I read the abstract, all that was available at the time. I noticed the affiliation of one of the authors: Rutgers, my undergraduate alma mater and current graduate school! Awesome, I'm all for school spirit! Except, the affiliation didn't actually say "Rutgers", it said "Butgers". A humorous typo... or something more sinister?