I once gave a seminar at Santa Cruz entitled "Some Interesting Positions in the Kama Sutra of Topological Defects." Michael Dine introduced me, but refused to say the title out loud.
What about hep-th/0304224 which came out roughly the same time as the movie? Or hep-th/0010105? Many people use catchy seminar titles as those are more informal.
Well, Tony (#1 in the list) is always around in the net, surely he will notice this thread. I think he was blacklisted from the arxiv after this title went out.
Some of my favourites are titles with "phantom" in it, like:
Can dark energy evolve to the phantom? (astro-ph/0407107)
Phantom dark energy, cosmic doomsday, and the coincidence problem. (astro-ph/0410508)
Perhaps they are not so "stupid" because Phantom is an accepted name for the model. But try showing the titles to a non-physicist and then convincing him that physicists aren't nuts.
But the one that takes the cake (or is it the pancake?) is without a doubt:
Local pancake defeats axis of evil (astro-ph/0509039)
7:34 AM, July 07, 2006
Anonymous said...
How about http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012
"String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal"
???
9:04 AM, July 07, 2006
Anonymous said...
Dear Bee,
What is wrong with 10 = 6 + 4?
M-theory says 10 = 11 while QCD counts the gluon combinations as 3 x 3 = 8.
there is nothing wrong with 4+6 = 10 as far as I can see. I mean, as you say, it could have been worse, like Pi^2~10 or so. He was banned from the arXiv because of the TITLE of the paper?
Hi anonymous,
I have not included any papers from the physics arxiv, there are too many with weird titles.
To the others: thanks! I have updated the list. I especially like the pancake :-)
I know you're all too young to remember, but "Escape from the Menace of the Giant Wormholes" (Coleman and Lee, 1989) really does deserve a spot. Those were the days.
3:48 PM, July 07, 2006
Thomas D said...
Tom Banks again - hep-th/0211160
Heretics of the false vacuum: Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay. 2.
Presumably: Return of the Heretics! He has copied the sensible part of the title from Coleman-de Luccia.
Also, I vividly remember a sentence from an abstract of a paper:
"The Killing fields are on the horizon"
which makes perfect sense in differential geometry! But I can't find the preprint any more.
5:17 PM, July 07, 2006
Dick said...
This from today's arxiv:
hep-ph/0607062 [abs, ps, pdf, other] : Title: An AdS/CFT Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind Authors: Hong Liu, Krishna Rajagopal, Urs Achim Wiedemann
5:29 PM, July 07, 2006
Dick said...
Oh gee, another one!
hep-th/0607031 [abs, ps, pdf, other] : Title: SUSY Moose Runs and Hops: An extra dimension from a broken deformed CFT Authors: Joshua Erlich, Jong Anly Tan (College of William and Mary)
5:30 PM, July 07, 2006
Anonymous said...
You missed my favourite: http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0111079 Deconstructing Noncommutativity with a Giant Fuzzy Moose
5:31 PM, July 07, 2006
fh said...
I submit:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0207123
Nutty Bubbles Authors: A.M. Ghezelbash, R.B. Mann
and http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0508162
Nuttier Bubbles Authors: Dumitru Astefanesei, Robert B. Mann, Cristian Stelea
These don't sound half as bad as some of the ones you read in biology journals. Make you cringe. Have a stupid question though, do the journals decide the titles or are the authors left to come up with these sparkling gems themselves.
6:08 AM, September 12, 2006
rillian said...
pipettemonkey,
I've not work in hep-th, but my experience in general physics is that the authors choose the titles. The editors may of course suggest revisions there as with elsewhere in the paper, of course.
I love "Deconstructing Noncommutativity with a Giant Fuzzy Moose," hep-th/0111079. Can someone say whether it's a joke or not? The authors clearly have a sense of humor (see the Acknowledgements) but I can't tell whether it's an actual impenetrable string theory paper, or just poking fun at same.
Ha! I just saw this thread and it's pretty funny! Us authors choose our own titles and we have great fun doing so. My favorite from one of my papers was "Warped Phenomenology," hep-ph/9909255. The journal made us change the title to "Phenomenology of the Randall-Sundrum Gauge Hierarchy Model," which doesn't quite have the same ring to it...
1:46 AM, February 16, 2007
mgary said...
Looking at today's arxiv, I notice that we had a new candidate for the stupid title list bestowed upon us: "A New Dimension Hidden in the Shadow of a Wall"
1:16 PM, February 28, 2007
Aaron Bergman said...
There was a whole fad of these for a while:. Off the top of my head, I remember (some more so than others)
"Donald Rumsfeld, in attempting to excuse the inexcusable, once (in)famously said that ``there are things that we know we know; there are things that we know we don't know; and then there are things that we don't know that we don't know". Recent discoveries about hadrons with heavy flavours fall into those categories. It is of course the third category that is the most tantalising, but lessons from the first two may help resolve the third."
Ulrich Haisch (Submitted on 23 Jun 2007) Abstract: Within constrained minimal-flavor-violation the large destructive flavor-changing Z-penguin managed to survive eradication so far. We give a incisive description of how to kill it using the precision measurements of the Z -> b anti-b pseudo observables. The derived stringent range for the non-standard contribution to the universal Inami-Lim function C leads to tight two-sided limits for the branching ratios of all Z-penguin dominated flavor-changing K- and B-decays.
Total recoil: the maximum kick from nonspinning black-hole binary inspiral: http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0610154 Turduckening black holes: an analytical and computational study: http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.3533 Excision without excision: the relativistic turducken: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.3101
Wally Greenberg says that T.V. stands for "The Very".
4:07 PM, February 02, 2012
Today, the arxiv gave me a new candidate for my Stupid Title List. Since we have been listing the last some days, here is another list. If you have futher suggestions, let me know :-)
10 = 6 + 4 Author: Frank Tony Smith arXiv: hep-th/9908205 log(M_Pl/m_3/2) Authors: Oscar Loaiza-Brito, Johannes Martin, Hans Peter Nilles, Michael Ratz arXiv: hep-th/0509158 Brane Big-Bang Brought by Bulk Bubble Authors: Uchida Gen, Akihiro Ishibashi, Takahiro Tanaka Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D66 (2002) 023519 arXiv: hep-th/0110286 The axis of evil Authors: Kate Land, Joao Magueijo arXiv: astro-ph/0502237 Journal-ref: Phys.Rev.Lett. 95 (2005) 071301 Local Pancake Defeats Axis of Evil Authors: Chris Vale arXiv: astro-ph/0509039 Why Eppley and Hannah's Experiment Isn't Author: James Mattingly arXiv: gr-qc/0601127 A Fly in the SOUP Authors: R. Holman, L. Mersini-Houghton arXiv: hep-th/0511112 Waking the Colored Plasma Authors: Jörg Ruppert, Berndt Müller arXiv: hep-ph/0503158 Much ado about nothing: a treatise on empty and not-so-empty spacetimes Authors: Damien Martin arXiv:gr-qc/0607022 Unhiggsing the del Pezzo Authors: Bo Feng, Sebastian Franco, Amihay Hanany, Yang-Hui He arXiv: hep-th/0209228 The Sybils' Advice on Charm (and tau Leptons) Authors: I.I. Bigi arXiv: hep-ph/0604038 X & Y Authors: L. Maiani, F. Piccinini, A.D. Polosa, V. Riquer arXiv: hep-ph/0512082 New Regions for a Chameleon to Hide Authors: Baruch Feldman, Ann E. Nelson arXiv: hep-ph/0603057 Cosmological Supersymmetry Breaking and the Power of the Pentagon: A Model of Low Energy Particle Physics Author: T. Banks arXiv: hep-ph/0510159 Remodeling the Pentagon After the Events of 2/23/06 Authors: T. Banks arXiv: hep-ph/0606313 Cosmic Strings - Dead Again? Author: Mark Hindmarsh arXiv: hep-ph/9806469 Brane New World Authors: S.W. Hawking, T. Hertog, H.S. Reall Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D62 (2000) 043501 arXiv: hep-th/0003052 Cloudshine: New Light on Dark Clouds Authors: Jonathan B. Foster, Alyssa A. Goodman Journal-ref: Phys.Rev. D62 (2000) 043501 arXiv: astro-ph/0510624 The Skyrmion strikes back: baryons and a new large N_c limit Authors: Aleksey Cherman, Thomas D. Cohen arXiv: hep-th/0607028 How Bob Laughlin Tamed the Giant Graviton from Taub-NUT space Authors: B.A.Bernevig, J. Brodie, L. Susskind, N. Toumbas Journal-ref: JHEP 0102 (2001) 003 arXiv: hep-th/0010105 The Battle of Albuera, the FC Liverpool and the Standard Model Authors: I.I. Bigi arXiv: hep-ph/0603087 Nutty Bubbles Authors: A.M. Ghezelbash, R.B. Mann Journal-ref: JHEP 0209 (2002) 045 arXiv: hep-th/0207123 Nuttier Bubbles Authors: Dumitru Astefanesei, Robert B. Mann, Cristian Stelea Journal-ref: JHEP 0601 (2006) 043 arXiv: hep-th/0508162 Deconstructing Noncommutativity with a Giant Fuzzy Moose Authors: Allan Adams, Michal Fabinger Journal-ref: JHEP 0204 (2002) 006 arXiv: hep-th/0111079 Escape From The Menace Of The Giant Wormholes Authors: Sidney R. Coleman, Ki-Myeong Lee Journal-ref: Phys. Lett. B 221:242,1989 Superbanana Orbits in Stellarator Geometries Authors: J. A. Derr, J. L. Shohet Journal-ref: Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 1730–1733 (1979) The mother of all protocols: Restructuring quantum information's family tree Authors: Anura Abeyesinghe, Igor Devetak, Patrick Hayden, Andreas Winter arXiv: quant-ph/0606225 Walking in the SU(N) Authors: Dennis D. Dietrich, Francesco Sannino arXiv: hep-ph/0611341 Higgs Pain? Take a Preon! Authors: J.-J. Dugne, S. Fredriksson, J. Hansson, E. Predazzi arXiv: hep-ph/9709227 The Matrix Reloaded - on the Dark Energy Seesaw Authors: Kari Enqvist, Steen Hannestad, Martin S. Sloth arXiv: hep-ph/0702236 A New Dimension Hidden in the Shadow of a Wall Author: Nemanja Kaloper arXiv: hep-th/0702206 Decapitating Tadpoles Authors: Allan Adams, John McGreevy, Eva Silverstein arXiv: hep-th/0209226
Please note that I have not read most of the above papers, and I am not judging on the scientific content of these works.
Will be updated from time to time. Last update: Feb 28th 2007
posted by Sabine Hossenfelder at 6:30 PM on Jul 6, 2006
"Stupid Title List"
35 Comments -
I once gave a seminar at Santa Cruz entitled "Some Interesting Positions in the Kama Sutra of Topological Defects." Michael Dine introduced me, but refused to say the title out loud.
9:35 PM, July 06, 2006
What about hep-th/0304224 which came out roughly the same time as the movie? Or hep-th/0010105? Many people use catchy seminar titles as those are more informal.
2:02 AM, July 07, 2006
Hope you only read the titles, and not filled your Mind, with junk which then has to be sent to recycle bin.
Mind you, you know what they say: "Never Judge A Book by its cover"
6:30 AM, July 07, 2006
Well, Tony (#1 in the list) is always around in the net, surely he will notice this thread. I think he was blacklisted from the arxiv after this title went out.
6:38 AM, July 07, 2006
Great list!
Some of my favourites are titles with "phantom" in it, like:
Can dark energy evolve to the phantom?
(astro-ph/0407107)
Phantom dark energy, cosmic doomsday, and the coincidence problem.
(astro-ph/0410508)
Perhaps they are not so "stupid" because Phantom is an accepted name for the model. But try showing the titles to a non-physicist and then convincing him that physicists aren't nuts.
But the one that takes the cake (or is it the pancake?) is without a doubt:
Local pancake defeats axis of evil
(astro-ph/0509039)
7:34 AM, July 07, 2006
How about http://arxiv.org/abs/physics/0312012
"String Theory, Universal Mind, and the Paranormal"
???
9:04 AM, July 07, 2006
Dear Bee,
What is wrong with 10 = 6 + 4?
M-theory says 10 = 11 while QCD counts the gluon combinations as 3 x 3 = 8.
Perhaps my maths is obsolete.
Best wishes,
Anon
9:08 AM, July 07, 2006
There are also titles which can be very misleading: for example, when scanning the arxive for information about dibaryons, I came across this paper:
hep-th/0305048: Dibaryon Spectroscopy
I may have been warned that it was in hep-th, but you can imagine that it was not exactly what I was looking for...
10:43 AM, July 07, 2006
I I Bigi will be disappointed, his titles deserve to be in the list.
1:01 PM, July 07, 2006
Hi Leuciopo, Hi Anon,
there is nothing wrong with 4+6 = 10 as far as I can see. I mean, as you say, it could have been worse, like Pi^2~10 or so. He was banned from the arXiv because of the TITLE of the paper?
Hi anonymous,
I have not included any papers from the physics arxiv, there are too many with weird titles.
To the others: thanks! I have updated the list. I especially like the pancake :-)
Best,
B.
2:46 PM, July 07, 2006
Particle physicists are obsessed with penguins,
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/bunny.htm
"Vicious mutant space alien nuclear holocaust penguin complicities," 17 references.
Either way, "mostly harmless."
3:13 PM, July 07, 2006
I know you're all too young to remember, but "Escape from the Menace of the Giant Wormholes" (Coleman and Lee, 1989) really does deserve a spot. Those were the days.
3:48 PM, July 07, 2006
Tom Banks again - hep-th/0211160
Heretics of the false vacuum: Gravitational effects on and of vacuum decay. 2.
Presumably: Return of the Heretics! He has copied the sensible part of the title from Coleman-de Luccia.
Also, I vividly remember a sentence from an abstract of a paper:
"The Killing fields are on the horizon"
which makes perfect sense in differential geometry! But I can't find the preprint any more.
5:17 PM, July 07, 2006
This from today's arxiv:
hep-ph/0607062 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: An AdS/CFT Calculation of Screening in a Hot Wind
Authors: Hong Liu, Krishna Rajagopal, Urs Achim Wiedemann
5:29 PM, July 07, 2006
Oh gee, another one!
hep-th/0607031 [abs, ps, pdf, other] :
Title: SUSY Moose Runs and Hops: An extra dimension from a broken deformed CFT
Authors: Joshua Erlich, Jong Anly Tan (College of William and Mary)
5:30 PM, July 07, 2006
You missed my favourite:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0111079
Deconstructing Noncommutativity with a Giant Fuzzy Moose
5:31 PM, July 07, 2006
I submit:
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0207123
Nutty Bubbles
Authors: A.M. Ghezelbash, R.B. Mann
and
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0508162
Nuttier Bubbles
Authors: Dumitru Astefanesei, Robert B. Mann, Cristian Stelea
11:32 AM, July 08, 2006
Here's one:
Superbanana Orbits in Stellarator Geometries
Phys. Rev. Lett. 43, 1730–1733 (1979)
J. A. Derr and J. L. Shohet
And for 'anon' above: 3x3 = 8+1 in QCD. The octet and singlet representations.
8:54 PM, July 09, 2006
I found a new one today at Dave Beacon's blog:
The mother of all protocols: Restructuring quantum information's family tree
http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0606225
7:08 AM, July 18, 2006
The article by Tom Banks listed above:
Remodeling the Pentagon After the Events of 2/23/06
is the best, because he also choses the titles of some sections appropriately :)
9:12 PM, August 29, 2006
A Fat Higgs with a Fat Top
Spacetime and vacuum as seen from Moscow
5:56 PM, August 31, 2006
GZK Violation - a Tempest in a (Magnetic) Teapot?
12:11 PM, September 06, 2006
These don't sound half as bad as some of the ones you read in biology journals. Make you cringe.
Have a stupid question though, do the journals decide the titles or are the authors left to come up with these sparkling gems themselves.
6:08 AM, September 12, 2006
pipettemonkey,
I've not work in hep-th, but my experience in general physics is that the authors choose the titles. The editors may of course suggest revisions there as with elsewhere in the paper, of course.
I love "Deconstructing Noncommutativity with a Giant Fuzzy Moose," hep-th/0111079. Can someone say whether it's a joke or not? The authors clearly have a sense of humor (see the Acknowledgements) but I can't tell whether it's an actual impenetrable string theory paper, or just poking fun at same.
10:59 PM, September 22, 2006
It's a Gluino! :)
8:55 PM, November 01, 2006
Two more submissions to this list:
Neutrinos in a Sterile Throat
The Axis of Evil revisited
7:56 PM, November 19, 2006
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0209226
decapitating tadpoles
7:31 PM, February 05, 2007
Ha! I just saw this thread and it's pretty funny! Us authors choose our own titles and we have great fun doing so. My favorite from one of my papers was "Warped Phenomenology," hep-ph/9909255. The journal made us change the title to "Phenomenology of the Randall-Sundrum Gauge Hierarchy Model," which doesn't quite have the same ring to it...
1:46 AM, February 16, 2007
Looking at today's arxiv, I notice that we had a new candidate for the stupid title list bestowed upon us:
"A New Dimension Hidden in the Shadow of a Wall"
1:16 PM, February 28, 2007
There was a whole fad of these for a while:. Off the top of my head, I remember (some more so than others)
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0107172
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0011125
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0008205
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0107199
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0003163
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0107088
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0104010
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0502021
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0003075
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0506130
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0404084
http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0108075
There are plenty of others I'm probably forgetting. (And I hope the spam catcher doesn't eat this.)
8:08 PM, February 28, 2007
Rumsfeld Hadrons
Abstract:
"Donald Rumsfeld, in attempting to excuse the inexcusable, once (in)famously said that ``there are things that we know we know; there are things that we know we don't know; and then there are things that we don't know that we don't know". Recent discoveries about hadrons with heavy flavours fall into those categories. It is of course the third category that is the most tantalising, but lessons from the first two may help resolve the third."
10:17 PM, June 20, 2007
How To Kill a Penguin
Ulrich Haisch
(Submitted on 23 Jun 2007)
Abstract: Within constrained minimal-flavor-violation the large destructive flavor-changing Z-penguin managed to survive eradication so far. We give a incisive description of how to kill it using the precision measurements of the Z -> b anti-b pseudo observables. The derived stringent range for the non-standard contribution to the universal Inami-Lim function C leads to tight two-sided limits for the branching ratios of all Z-penguin dominated flavor-changing K- and B-decays.
8:55 PM, June 25, 2007
You probably think this paper's about you: narcissists' perceptions of their personality and reputation.
New particles or "Why I believe in quarks"
Every time a physicist says "I don't believe in quarks," somewhere a quark dies.
12:03 AM, January 24, 2012
Total recoil: the maximum kick from nonspinning black-hole binary inspiral:
http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0610154
Turduckening black holes: an analytical and computational study:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0809.3533
Excision without excision: the relativistic turducken:
http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.3101
1:27 PM, January 25, 2012
Check the author list on
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-ph/9306225
Wally Greenberg says that T.V. stands for "The Very".
4:07 PM, February 02, 2012