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Feedback: Particle softly vanishes away

16 December 2014

Âé¶¹´«Ã½. Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

(Image: Paul McDevitt)

Feedback is our weekly column of bizarre stories, implausible advertising claims, confusing instructions and more

Particle softly vanishes away

SNARKS: what kind of particle would they be? Confronted with a piece of fruitloopery defining “quarky behaviour” as emitting “small, negative message clouds”, our sense of lexical symmetry demanded a particle of that name (8 November).

We had in mind “snark”, in the sense of a snippy comment. Magnus Peterson was just one of the readers who reminded us that Lewis Carroll had anticipated us in his poem : “To deal properly with quantum fruitloopery, you need a boojum. Because, encountering it, purveyors…

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