Scientific Pub Names
Clifford at 1:13 am, February 17th, 2006So on the walk back from the Cat and Fiddle that night (the night described in the previous post), as a result of a question from someone (I forgot who) about it, I got to thinking about the naming patterns for pubs in the UK. There’s an awful lot of pairs of things. In fact there are two of them in the previous post…. “The Cock and Bull”, “The Cat and Fiddle”, and there are several other well known ones like “The Dog and Duck”, “Rose and Crown”, “Fox and Hounds”, “Swan and Three Signets” (ok, that’s four). It’s also in newly made up names for chains, like “The Slug and Lettuce”, “The Hedgehog and Hogshead” (I love that one….) Notice that there’s often a sort of adversarial character to the pairing, which is rather nice…… There’s also possessive-type names like “The King’s Arms”, “The Nag’s Head”, etc. Those can be good too.
So on the way back from a cancelled concert just now (see previous post), I got to thinking….. In that topsy-turvy universe about which I plan to write a book or a screenplay one day, where the everyday popular culture is all based around science and scientists, the pub names might also reflect that. So what would be some good names for pubs, coming from science? I thought of a few really lame ones, but did not get any truly good ones. Then, I thought it might be a game you’d like to join in! Let’s try to make it challenging by having the names be in the traditional pub-type formats, such as those above.
Here are a few, off the top of my head:
The Particle and Wave
The Action and Reaction
Those fit the adversarial idea ok, but I just don’t like ‘em very much, frankly. I’m surprised how hard it is to think of good ones, but that might be because I’ve not had any dinner. Maybe it’s because I’m trying to put concepts together. How about some scientific instruments?
The Astrolabe and Compass.
Ooo! I like that… not quite adversaries, but a nice pairing with lots of history and the smell of damp leather. Always a good thing. Let me try another….
The Microscope and Spyglass.
Less good. Swapped Telescope out for the latter. Seemed better. But not a real success.
The Crucible and Calipers
Ha! That’s better on a second reading than I first thought.
The Mortar and Pestle
Of course! That’s nice. So nice there must be a pub named that already, no? If not, remember me what you steal the name….
Moving away from instruments for a moment, I just thought of:
The Glass and Crystal
Hmmm, interesting name. That takes a bit of explaining. Those are actually adversaries in a sense. One is disordered at the microscopic level and is in some senses is rather more like a liquid than a solid (there’s a long discussion to be had here….. second vs first order phase transition upon forming,….. etc etc…), while the other’s molecules are highly ordered.
The Cryostat and Furnace
That could be a fun one….
Ok, I’d better do some work now. I’m pretty sure that you can do better with this theme than I have. Have a go.
-cvj
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How about The Electron and the Hole?
It’s crucial to get the scansion right. Fot example, compare “The Wave and Particle” to “The Particle and Wave.” To me, the former sounds a lot better, and unlike “The Action and Reaction,” the order doesn’t matter (does it?).
I’m usually good at this sort of thing, but I’m drawing a blank. Maybe famous collaborations, e.g. “The Crick and Watson,” though I hate to leave out Franklin…
Of course, there are other genres of pub names, such as those that invoke royalty (”The King’s Head”; “The Queen’s Arms”) — so how about “The Noble Gases”? It seems to me that you could have the most fun with the posessives, though: Newton’s Laws of Motion, Avogadro’s Number, etc.
The ultimate name is of course, the H-Bar and Grille. Supposedly this is an actual place near one of the government labs, but I don’t remember which one.
The Chimera and Clone would be a rather disturbing place to get a drink. It would serve fusion food of very consistent quality, though.
Going with janet and the possessives, how about “Euler’s Relation” - though it would of course be more appropriate for a very elegant wine bar than a pub.
I’ll have a think, though I don’t know that I can beat “The Noble Gases” - I really like that one
Yes, “The Noble Gases” is brillaint, although it did not quite fit the constraints, but clearly works. “The Rare Earths” could be jsut down the road…run by a rival landlord.
A new-style pub that the old-timers don’t like, but the younger set like a lot has opened across town,….”The Transition Metals”.
I do like “The Electron and Hole” too.
-cvj
Cliff, don’t forget that many English pubs also have abstract names such as ‘The Navigation’ or ‘The Endeavour’ etc.
Been a while since I even thought of anything scientific… but here’s my list of cheesy ideas:
The Up and Charm
The Angstrom and Gray
The Lux and Lumen
The Ohm and Coulomb
The Quark and Color
The Strong and Weak (hey, it’s still scientific…)
The Running and Coupling (likewise, and more…)
The Schrodinger and Cat
The Geiger and Gamma
The Fermi and Pile
The Dirac and Sea
The Leibnitz and Newton
The Bohr and Planck (nice homonyms, but not really rivals…)
(The Sabre and Plank being better still, but not scientific…)
The Dual and Throat
The Landscape and String
The Knot and Loop
The Square and Hypotenuse
The Phonon and Lattice
The Gauge and Symmetry
The GUT and Scale
The Chain and Poke (not scientific, but nicely graphic…)
The Wino and Wimp (had to get this one in)
That world, “where the everyday popular culture is all based around science and scientists,” sounds wonderful. A place where science has more influence in popular culture and means more to people is certainly a nice idea.
Btw, Cliff, when the name ‘Cosmic Variance’ was born, didn’t you feel like adding one more word to the end of it so that it had the initials CVJ? Something like… Cosmic Variance Journal? Cosmic Variance Journey?
Off to bed now…really late here and have a 9:00am class…. but just have to say wow… “The Lux and Lumen”, and “The Square and Hypotenuse” are especially brilliant ! Will comment more on the other questions later. About the idea… I had it many years ago, as a backdrop for a film…..but wanted to break it out into something bigger…. one day…. I know about the abstract names…. but it makes it too easy. Better to have some constraints to make it more fun.
Cheers,
-cvj
Perhaps a bit too geeky, but what about:
The Charm and the Strange.
A few more:
The Flux and Field
The Divergence and Curl
The Torque and… Moment/Turn/Lever
The Voltage and Current
The Measure and Collapse
The Spin and Charge (or Spin and Colour or Colour and Charge)
The Contraction and Dilation sounds more like childbirth than relativity…
The Ray and Lens
How about “The Li(N) and the Lambda”?
There’s a pub in Birmingham which changed it’s name to the Quantum. But I guess it wasn’t a popular move - they changed it back to the King’s Head a few months later.
It’s too easy to construct something inappropriate out of charm(less), top(less!), and beauties, but that might attract the wrong clientel
plus, no alliteration here.
Well, sticking (OK, cheap one) with QCD here, how about
“The gluon and the ghost”,
“The one-particle-irreducible and the onium”,
“The partially conserved and the perturbed”.
Not all opposites but…
The Theoretician’s Pencil
The Geometer’s Metric
The Gene and Bible
The Summer Solstice
The Sine and Cosine
The Graph and Graticule
The Square on the Hypotenuse (stolen and reworked)
The Strange Boson
The Laughing Quark
The Anthropic Arms
The Mile and Millimetre
The EEqualsEmCeeSquared
The Abacus and Slide-rule
The Valve and Transistor
The PhD’s Conjecture
The Cat and Quanta
The Zenith and Nadir
The Cosmos and Constant
Would anyone care to join me for a beer? It’s Happy Hour over at The Phase Transition.
“The Dee and Aye” always sounded like fun.
I think “The Quark and the Jaguar” is taken.
How about “The Hubble and Bubble”
The Conjecture and Proof
The Solute and Solvent
The Fermi and Bose
The Joule and Watt
The Local and Global
The Magnet and Monopole
The Truth and Beauty
The Asymptote and Tangent
The Dense and Diffuse (ok, so I was getting tired by the end of my run…)
Elliot, that’s great! I’m trying to come up with something to do with black holes/singularities, but failing so far.
Here’s one with a double meaning physics/non-physics.
The Locals and Commuters
Here’s one that doesn’t quite fit the rules but would likely attract Stephen Hawking,(and maybe some chemists as well.)
The No Boundary Solution
The Event Horizon
The Pair Bond
The Grapes and Jello.
The Phlogiston and Ether.
The Four Elements.
The Scalar and Vector.
Bunsen’s Burner.
Erlenmeyer’s flask.
The Flask and Beaker.
The Teflon Stopcock.
The Buret and Stopcock.
The Pocket Protector.
The Labcoat and Glasses.
I can see “The Event Horizon” popping up in SoCal or NYC pretty easily. Obviously its where new cutting edge music/comedy/performance act’s are showcased with an open mike night as well.
When are we going???
Pair Bond would have been great for valentines day
The Black Hole’s Hair
The Quark’s Colours
The Light’s Speed
The Beam’s Pipe
The Maxwell’s Equations
The Varying Constant
The Sliding Scale
The Lepton and Quark
The Core and Shell
The Photon and Z
The Liquid and Gas
The Scalar and Vector
The Contour and Pole
There’s a bar called “The Miracle of Science” down the road from MIT. Their menu is in the form of a table of elements on a large chalkboard.
Although it doesn’t fit the pattern, the name that most resonates with me so far is
astromcnaught’s “The Laughing Quark”. That just sounds like a great place to hang out.
My best shot would be
The String and Brane.
Poppycock, what about
The Metric’s Trace
The Quark and Wormhole
The Black Hole’s Horizon
The Planck and Geodesic
Then there are actual pubs, in Cambridge MA USA: The Plough and Stars, and The Science Bar
Oops, apologies to Todd on the Miracle of Science bar - we always called it just The Science Bar. Any bar with an autoclave in it is OK by me…
The Commutator and Brushes
I’ve always liked “The H and Bar.” In homage to M-Theory, the ‘H’ is whatever you want to make of it, Hangover, Hookup, Hurl, etc. It would be even better if we could get the pub to serve decent English food. Pi’s and so forth…
Pythagoras & Beans
I go with agm , H-Bar & Grille is perfect. Each night each patron gets a spin on the Wheel of Uncertainty and may on a random basis get a free pint! Also the “e” on Grille makes it more Englishy, unlike putting one on pub.
What can I say? WOW! They’re all so good, and some of these are unbelievably brilliant!
Keep them coming….. if this science thing does not work out for us, we can start opening science pubs all over our cities….
More! More!
-cvj
Don’t you think Klute in durham (apologies for those that have never been but its a sort of seedy dive for underage drinking and awful music) should be renamed the Fuzzy Funnel
also thought of:
The Weyl Bar (see above)
Noether’s Current (Fixed Charge entry, drink all you like)
Archimede’s Bath (with assoicated club night Eureka)
The Homomorphism (would be flying a rainbow flag outside)
Cauchy’s Residue (Polish pub)
Sorry.
The Small Change and Big Bang.
Genus Hole, or maybe, ahem…the Glass room, or maybe, Superfluid Blackhole,:) The Laval Nozzle?
The Klein Bottle and Moebius Strip.
Umm… It didn’t sound good. Perhaps better to separate the nice and the naughty:
The Klein Bottle
The Moebius Strip
Two Pints or a Quark ?
The Charmed and Strange (a slight variation on an earlier one)
The String and Brane, perhaps?
Galileo’s Glass
The Purine and Pyrimidine (the biologist in me comes out)
The Coordinate Plane
The Imaginary Number
the i, pi, and e
We should also come up with some drink names, like “The Atom Smasher” or something like that.
The Bra and Ket
The Eightfold Way
The Standing Wave and Anti-de”Sitter” Space (ok this belongs on the bad pun thread)
Michelson and Morley’s
Its and Bits
Positive Charge
Superfluids
Magnetic Moments
Quantum Foam
Oooh, this is fun:
The Brane and Hartle (doesn’t quite fit together)
Planck’s Foam
Rutherford’s Den (this is a real lab where Rutherford worked)
The Skein and Link
Wilson’s Loop
The Twisted Brane
The Bunsen Burner
The Ribbon and Chainmail (for the knotty types)
The Speed of Light
Dirac’s Sea (an English one)
Schwarzschild’s Horizon
The Absorption Line
Schwinger’s Pint
The Everyhead and Blackbody
Oh dear, I’d better stop this….
It occurs to me that there should be a pub called “Schroedinger’s Cup” wherein if you never observe your drink, it will be simultaneously empty and full.
Uncertain Principles
The Fission and Bang. A great place to get blown out of your mind.
The D ‘n A
Some of these sound more like band names than pubs, but I suppose there is a lot of overlap.
A few more ideas (some similar to those already mentioned):
King Philip’s (probably too obscure, even for this crowd)
The Genotype and the Phenotype
The Double Helix
The Top Quark
Of course, pace Linnaeus, the ultimate scientufic pub name would be Publicusdomus alcoholicus.
Remember that a lot of the names that you gave are really descriptions of the pictures boards that hang outside the pubs. This was even more important before a lot of people were literate, so “Cock and Bull” would have a picture of a cock and bull outside. Cat and Fiddle similarly, King’s Arms would have a sword and Axe ore something like that. So what would the pictures on the Pub sign be for all your names?
Not physics, but
Ethan’n'all
Location and Type of free-house?
The String and Fiddle (Live Arguments daily)
The H-Bar (Regular, for up and downs)
The P + Q
The Vacuum Chamber ( with a Dark retarded “Function” Room )
The Spectrum ( D.I.S.C.O )
All of the above only serve Half-Spin-Measure’s,(no drinks are shaken or stirred!) and their snack/food menu’s are only limited to Periods due to constant decay modes no longer than the confirmed standard Half-Life.
The Planck Area (with redwood beams)
The Densitized Tetrad
The Singular Complex
The Clock and Train
The Bohr Magneton
The Fine Structure Constant
The Orrery and Ephemeris
Hi Mark
Planck’s Foam could be an old ship’s deck with the ocean washing across it. Most of them have obvious options - like Archimede’s in his bath, or the Double Helix or…
Oops - sorry about the apostrophe.
DDD, D Brane Delight, or Viscosious Place, Molasses or Honey Stir.
Folks, let’s not forget to try to stick reasonably close to (or at least within sight of) the traditional constraints mentioned in the orginal post……makes it more fun to work within the constraints… it’s easy to think of cool names that could fit a rock band, blog, night club, etc…. but the trick is to pick things that immediately inspire a pub. There have been some amazing ones chosen so far… keep ‘em coming!
-cvj
The Null Space (better as a grad student pub)
Newton’s bucket
Galileo’s balls
The Quasar and Lark
The Beagle and Endeavour
The Dwarf and Giant
I’ll go:
The Bell and Tango
The World’s Branch
The Killing Field
And I actually know a Bar in Nürnberg called:
Time and Space
The Tree and the Leaf
The Pitchblende pit
The Silicon’s head