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Better physics terminology

In theoretical physics, most stuff is named after the person who “discovered it” first. I have several issues with this:

• The resulting names are horribly undescriptive and hard-to-remember,
• and they are seldom accurate, and they almost always leave out important people that participated in the research in question (cf. Stigler’s law, scientific priority)
• It is a self-serving intergenerational and interpersonal contract - a main motivation for someone naming stuff after people is that they hope that someone will name something after them in return.
• Naming things after yourself is generally frowned upon for a good reason - but nevertheless, people frequently name stuff after their colleagues to bolster the reputation of their department/university/etc. For instance, one of my QFT professors insisted to call Wilson loops “Wegner-Wilson loops”, because Wegner, a physicist from my university, allegedly discovered them first in a different context. My professor admitted himself that no one outside our uni was doing this.
• This naming scheme sets the wrong incentives - instead of encouraging people to unify concepts to make them as simple as possible, it incentivises them to pass their concepts off as something new (and not give them proper, descriptive names), in hopes that someone else will name it after them.

General

• Lagrangian (density) -> action (density)
• Hamiltonian (density) -> phase-space flow, temporal translation/time evolution operator, energy
• Euler-Lagrange equation -> (action) extremalizing equation

Electrodynamics

• Maxwell equation(s) -> electrodynamic equations
• Lorentz force -> electromagnetic force
• Poynting vector -> (electromagnetic) energy current
• Dirichlet boundary condition -> fixed-field boundary condition
• von Neumann boundary condition -> fixed-derivative boundary condition

Tensor algebra

• Kronecker delta -> identity (tensor)
• Levi-Civita symbol -> pseudoscalar
• antisymmetric rank 2 tensor -> bivector (e.g. electromagnetic field bivector, relativistic angular momentum bivector)

Quantum mechanics

• Pauli algebra -> geometric algebra of space
• Dirac algebra -> geometric algebra of spacetime
• Dirac operator -> geometric derivative/vector derivative

Quantum field theory

• Weyl fermion -> chiral fermion

• Dirac fermion -> (complex) bichiral fermion

• Majorana fermion -> realified bichiral fermion

• Klein-Gordon field -> scalar boson field

• Yukawa coupling -> scalar-fermion coupling

• Fermi coupling -> four-fermion coupling

• Wick expansion -> (anti)commutative expansion

• Feynman diagram -> perturbative diagram, tensor diagram, wavemode diagram

• LSZ reduction formula -> amputation formula

• Grassmann numbers -> anticommuting numbers, a-numbers

• Wilson loop -> parallel transport loop

• Schwinger functional -> connected generating functional

• Coleman-Weinberg potential -> 1-loop effective potential

Standard Model

• Weinberg-Salam/Higgs * -> electroweak *
• Higgs * -> barygenic *
• CKM matrix -> quark mixing matrix
• PMNS matrix -> neutrino mixing matrix

Special relativity

• Minkowski/Lorentz * -> spacetime *
• ultra-relativistic -> photoid

General relativity

• Christoffel symbols -> connection (coefficients)
• Levi-Civita connection -> torsion-free metric connection
• Riemann tensor -> curvature tensor
• Ricci tensor -> reduced curvature tensor
• Ricci scalar -> curvature scalar
• Einstein tensor -> conserved curvature tensor
• Friedman-Lemaître-Robertson-Walker metric -> space-scaling metric
• energy-momentum tensor/stress-energy tensor -> 4-momentum 4-current / momergy churrent