E Pluribus Boojum: the physicist as neologist

I know the exact moment when I decided to make the word “boojum” an internationally accepted scientific term. I was just back from a symposium at the University of Sussex near Brighton, honoring the discovery of the superfluid phases of liquid helium‐3, by Doug Osheroff, Bob Richardson, and Dave Lee. The Sussex Symposium took place during the drought of 1976. The Sussex downs looked like brown Southern California hills. For five of the hottest days England has endured, physicists from all over the world met in Sussex to talk about what happens at the very lowest temperatures ever attained.

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