I love to collect possible titles for pieces I’ll probably never write. (It’s my version of “Hey, that would make a good name for a band.”) There are many scientific concepts that would make great titles, and some that perhaps sound more like a book title than like what they really are. Here are a few examples:

The Sphere of Confusion This quantity describes the accuracy of a goniometer, which is used to measure angles, but wouldn’t it make a good title for a domestic thriller about someone who’s gaslighting another person? Or maybe a novel about war. This one has a lot of possibilities, life being as confusing as it is.

The Equation of Time This describes the difference between two types of solar time, that is, time based on where the sun is in the sky. For some reason this sounds to me like a good title for a memoir, or maybe a multigenerational family saga. It might also work as a title for a nonfiction book on the mathematical modeling of history (e.g., cliodynamics).

The Cosmic Censorship Hypothesis This is a mathematical statement regarding the invisibility of singularities in general relativity, but it would also make a great science fiction title.

The Three-Body Problem This is the problem of describing the motions of three bodies that interact under Newton’s laws and the law of gravitation, given their initial positions, velocities, and masses. It would also make a nice title for a story about a relationship triangle, particularly a romantic triangle.

The Law of Tolerance In ecology, this law describes the way that the distribution or abundance of a species is determined by a certain limiting environmental factor or combination of factors. But it might make a good title for a geopolitical thriller, or, going to the other extreme, a cozy novel about small-town life.

The Principle of Least Action In physics, this principle provides a way of describing the motion of objects that is independent of Newton’s laws. But it sounds poetic enough that it would be a great title in any number of contexts. I can imagine a novel about a person who slides through life without attempting much, or perhaps a book about a Zen community.

The Islets of Langerhans These are areas in the pancreas where hormone-producing cells are found, but I could believe this is the title of a novel about an idyllic summer in a fictional Baltic location.

The Crypts of Lieberkühn These are glands found in the lining of the intestines, but the phrase certainly sounds like the title of a Victorian Gothic novel to me.

Obviously I’m not the first to have thought of borrowing titles from science. Wallace Stegner called one of his novels Angle of Repose, after a term used in geology to describe the largest angle at which a slope consisting of loose material can remain stable. Similarly, Shirley Hazzard wrote a novel called The Transit of Venus, after the relatively rare astronomical event in which we see Venus passing directly in front of the sun. I’m sure there are many other possibilities; post your ideas in the comments.

In my first post, I noted that the words granite and corn share the Latin root granum, granite for its granular texture and corn for its original meaning as the local grain crop, whatever it might be. I recently learned that pomegranate also shares this root, and the pomegranate itself has a fascinating history to boot.

The pomegranate (or its wild progenitors) probably came from somewhere in central Asia, but it moved quickly along trade routes to the Levant and beyond. It was called malum Punica, the apple of Carthage, for its association with Carthaginian traders.¹ The English word pomegranate comes from the medieval Latin pomum granatum, the grained apple; this name refers to the granular look of the many seeds packed inside the fruit. Scientists today call the pomegranate Punica granatum. In French, it is la grenade, and the word grenade was also given to the military device, presumably for some visual resemblance to the fruit.

The pomegranate became widely cultivated in Spain after Abd Al-Rahman fled Damascus when his family’s Umayyad dynasty collapsed in the eighth century CE and eventually (sometimes in great difficulty) made his way to the Iberian peninsula. He founded a Muslim dynasty that ruled much of Iberia for nearly 300 years, and the pomegranate, a familiar food of his home, became part of the culture of Iberia. The Emirate of Granada was named for the pomegranate (granada in Spanish) and was the last part of the peninsula to fall to the Catholic Spanish. Today, of course, Granada is the name of a Spanish province and its capital city.

The official symbol of Granada, Spain is the pomegranate. In fact, the pomegranate has a rich and lengthy history of symbolic meaning worldwide. It represents fertility in many cultures, for example, and it is central to the Greek myth of Persephone.

Early in 1492, Granada fell to Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile, who thus ended Muslim rule in the Iberian peninsula. Their daughter, Katherine of Aragon, married the English king Henry VIII; as her heraldic symbol, she chose the pomegranate, which represents her Spanish origins and perhaps, poignantly, her hopes for fertility. Pomegranates are still placed on her grave in Peterborough Cathedral.

I learned the story of the pomegranate’s transplantation to Spain, and the stories of many other foods and spices traded along the spice routes, in Gary Paul Nabhan’s excellent Cumin, Camels, and Caravans: A Spice Odyssey. I highly recommend this book if you’re interested in food, travel, history, or botany.

1 The Latin word malum, or apple, meant more than just the apples we know; it was also used as a generic word for fruit. ^↩