Who says scientists don’t have a sense of humour?
Odd names for scientific concepts has a long tradition that lay folk don’t appreciate.
Take, for instance, the ongoing discussion about whether dark energy is a “quintessence” field.
I’ve met lay folk that think it cannot be a real phenomenon because it’s named in such a silly way.
But there’s a long tradition of this in science.
Everyone knows what “electricity” is, and everyone considers it a “real” thing, and think of the word as a legitimate and serious term for a real phenomenon.
But consider what it would have been like centuries ago, when people first started to consider electrical phenomena. Read the Wikipedia entry for “electicity”. You’ll see that it was originally based on the latin and ancient greek word for “amber”, because the static electric properties of rubbed amber was one of the first studied electrical phenomena.
So the word we use for the stuff that comes out of wall outlets was derived from the word for a rock.
Given that, is “quintessence” really that silly?
Or is it just a touch of fun?
