
"Scappuccino?" you ask? A two-fold salute to my coffee-schlepping days and particle physics. According to supersymmetry, if there were a particle called a cappuccino, and it were a boson, it would have a force-carrying sister particle, which would be called a scappuccino. (If my fictional cappuccino were a fermion, its supersymmetric particle would be called a cappuccinino, but that would just be silly.) For a playful primer on the naming of sparticles, check out this poem by Cornell professor Philip Tanedo.
P.S. For anyone wondering, the "SLAC" in SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory used to stand for "Stanford Linear Accelerator Center." Now it doesn't strictly stand for anything, except, perhaps, the laboratory's tendency to generate acronyms. Newbies are greeted with a home-made acronym dictionary and an encouraging smile.
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