Ron Wormus <prot...@frii.com> wrote:
> I find the "heat after death" nomenclature to be a bit weird. It is a bit weird. I use it from force of habit. There is some benefit to preserving technical terminology with peculiar etymology or mistaken etymology: you can look up the early papers on the subject. The term remains the same over time, even though it is strange. The classic example is "meteorology" which -- as it turned out -- has nothing to do with meteors. If you want read old papers on the subject or the history of it, keeping the same word is handy. You can see that word was coined around 1750 and peaked during WWII, I expect with British words like "met agency": http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=meteorology&year_start=1700&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3 > I think Rossi's "self sustaining mode" is more descriptive. Any idea where > "heat after death" originated? > It is more descriptive. "Heat after death" originated with Fleischmann and Pons, like everything else in this field. They get the blame for everything. - Jed
