Colorful Terms Used by Physicists

In last week’s Science:

Brown muck

Consider a particle called the B meson, which consists of a heavy bottom quark and a light up or down antiquark. Crudely speaking, the quark and antiquark are bound by gluons like two bricks held together with a little mortar. In reality, however, the meson is far more complex. The gluons themselves exchange gluons to form a roiling tangle. And thanks to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, quark-antiquark pairs constantly pop into and out of existence, adding to the complexity of the mess surrounding the bottom quark, which goes by the technical term “brown muck.”

Brown muck??!?? Never, ever, ever let a physicist in your marketing department.