Particle physics

Two entries here carry a syllable that English speakers have met in translation without knowing it: Eich-, in die Eichsymmetrie and das Eichboson. The verb eichen is what the German weights and measures authority does when it checks a pair of scales or a petrol pump against the official standard. When Hermann Weyl, writing in German, proposed that the laws of physics should not change if the standard of length were reset from one point to the next, he called the idea Eichinvarianz, and English rendered eichen as “gauge”. The idea later moved from lengths to phases, but the name stayed. So “gauge boson” is not an English coinage that German borrowed back: the German word came first, and to a German ear it still sounds faintly of the measuring office — a theory built on the freedom to recalibrate.