interesting thought in a Sapir-Whorf kinda way
joeyh at
We don't give names to black holes. I wonder what this says about how we think about them?
Even the black hole in the center of the Milky Way has no name. "Sagittarius A*" is the name of something near it, perhaps its accreation disk, but not the black hole itself.
There's an explanation involving objects needing to be observed to be named, and black holes of course don't emit (much) so can't be seen.
But, we have no difficulty naming exoplanets that have not been directly observed in EM but only deduced by radial velocity measurements of their gravity. For that matter, we've detected gravity waves from colliding black holes now, but the resulting larger black hole didn't get a name either.
What else don't we name (dark matter halos perhaps?), and what does it say about how we think about this stuff?
clacke@libranet.de ❌, Nathan Willis, Mike Linksvayer, Charles Stanhope likes this.
clacke@libranet.de ❌, clacke@libranet.de ❌ shared this.
clacke@libranet.de ❌ at 2017-02-24T06:30:35Z
Stephen Sekula likes this.
I'm not sure I completely agree with your premise. For instance, no one has named the habitable zone planet around Proxima Centauri, currently labeled "Proxima Centari B". Granted, it's only been about 1 year since the publicity of its existence, so perhaps that is a bit soon, but for now that's its official name. The very first black hole ever discovered is named "Cygnus X-1" because it was discovered as an x-ray emitter in the constellation Cygnus, the swan. It has a companion star, named by the catalog in which the star appears, HDE 226868 [1]. Neither of these is a very sexy nor memorable name, though I would argue that "Cygnus X-1" (memoralized in a song by the band, Rush) is actually the more memorable of the two dry names.
The newly discovered planets around TRAPPIST-1 are merely labeled by a letter indicating their distance from the parent dwarf star. While some people have suggested cute names (e.g. Neil deGrasse Tyson had a cute tweet about naming them after the 7 dwarves since they orbit a dwarf star, but that was really tongue-in-cheek), they have no other official designation.
I would love it if the supermassive black hole at the center of the Milky Way had a name. I am, personally, a sucker for Greek mythology. I vote "Charybdis". Or, we could just name it more appropriate to its role in our galaxy, as the heart of our swirling mass of stars. A good word for "heart" in a human language would work well here. Something poetic.
THere are even more ghostly things than these in the cosmos. The tiny neutrino, a subatomic particle so ghostly it can pass through a light-year of lead before interacting with any of the lead, was named BEFORE it was discovered as its presence was inferred from nuclear decay. So here we named a ghostly thing that literally cannot ever be seen directly with light for it carries zero electric charge.
As for dark matter, since we still don't know what it is made from I feel it's better not to get too attached to the concept. While "dark matter" as literal "matter" (made from building blocks of some kind) is the best hypothesis, there is no guarantee it will win the day in experiment. Dark Matter may be something wholly different from the matter and forces we have yet encountered, and deserves patience while experiments hunt for the explanation of this phenomenon. The Milky Way's dark matter halo could be named, but I feel it's just better to think of it as the hole into which the gas and stars that preceded the Milky Way's formation fell and became gravitationally entangled. If the supermassive black hole is the heart of the Milky Way, the dark matter halo may be our mother.
So I would argue that our history on this is muddled. Certainly, the very first black hole ever discovered is named, and named in a far more memorable way than most stars are named. It would be fun to open up the naming of the black hole at the center of the Milky Way. The ghostly neutrino was named before it was discovered, and now plays a central role in the frontier of physics [2]. We've only just learned how to detect black holes using spacetime itself, so maybe there will be an effort for naming here, though the current projections are that we will observe 10s to 100s of black hole mergers a year... which is a LOT of naming.
Take heart in the fact that we cannot name all the things we discover. This means the universe is rich in things to be discovered. There are more atoms in the human body than there are stars in the observable universe. We cannot name all the atoms, and we cannot see all the stars. But we don't need to. We can merely take comfort in the fact that our atoms and those stars are linked through the cosmic stretch of time, and that we are part of something too great to be fully named.
[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1401.1035
[2] http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/cern-ramps-up-neutrino-program , http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/hunting-the-nearly-un-huntable , http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/five-fascinating-facts-about-DUNE , http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/article/the-neutrino-turns-60
Stephen Sekula at 2017-02-24T08:12:50Z
Charles Stanhope likes this.
