Linguistic phenomenology from Scientific American.com:

"The Simpsons Movie debuted this weekend to higher-than-expected sales, bearing testament to the show's enduring popularity. If you needed any convincing that after 18 years on the air The Simpsons has thoroughly penetrated the popular consciousness, consider the following usage of the word "embiggen," one of the many fine references with which one Simpsons fan can detect another.

The term comes from the 1996 episode Lisa the Iconoclast, in which we learn that a young Jebediah Springfield is supposed to have spoken it after wrestling a bison, or "land cow."


Jebediah: [on film] A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.

Edna: Embiggens? I never heard that word before I moved to Springfield!

Ms. Hoover: I don't know why. It's a perfectly cromulent word.

Here is the word in a rather different context:

"While in both cases for P anti-D3-branes the probe approximation is clearly not good, in the set up of this paper we could argue that there is a competing effect which can overcome the desire of the anti-D3s to embiggen, namely their attraction towards the wrapped D5s. Hence, also on the gravity side, the non-supersymmetric states would naively be meta-stable."

That's string theory-ese, for the uninitiated.

...
This passage comes from a paper by Stanford University physicist Shamit Kachru and three colleagues, entitled (duh) Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking. [Hat tip to Kottke.org by way of the illustrious Chris Mims.]

String theory is physicists' best guess at how to unify quantum mechanics with gravity, which ought to be swell for understanding what happens inside black holes and before the big bang, as well as why nature has the different forces it does. Unfortunately, researchers have had a hard time putting it to the test because it is consistent with many different possible universes, of which more later.

I emailed Kachru, one of the most prominent younger researchers working on string theory, to get the back-story. Here's what he told me, in Q-and-A form. (Hint: it only has to do with the biggest development in string theory in the last 10 years.)

SA: How did you come across the word embiggen?

SK: I first came across this word in "The Simpsons," a source of knowledge for all serious theoretical physicists. It was used in the sentence "A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man." So by context I assume it means "to enlarge or expand in size."

The passage deals with something called a D-brane. What is that, exactly, and why is it important?

"You can imagine two types of strings, closed loops and "open strings" (like jump ropes, with two ends). The open strings can only end on objects called D-branes, which are objects in the theory that can have any spatial dimension from 0 (a point) to 9 (filling all 10 spacetime dimensions). So e.g. a 2-brane is like a sheet of paper, on which open strings are allowed to end.

In many string theories, although gravity arises "for free," the only way to get gauge interactions [i.e., other forces--ed.] analogous to electromagnetism and the strong and weak nuclear forces, is by having D-branes present in the vacuum [meaning spacetime].

A 3-brane could fill all of our observed 3 spatial dimensions, and if the right gauge interactions arise on it from careful study of the open strings, we could even imagine that we live on such a D3 brane.

Later, in my research (starting in [this 2001 paper]), I encountered a phenomenon where D-branes in certain string backgrounds [or shapes of spacetime] like to expand into "larger" D-branes (which is known in general as the Myers effect). A rough analogue is the behavior of an atom in an electric field: although the atom is electrically neutral, the field polarizes the constituent electrons and protons, and pulls the atom apart a little bit, making it bigger. (I.e. there is [what is called] a dipole moment [or an overall separation of positive and negative charge]).

Similarly, D-branes in string theory can carry dipoles of higher D-brane charges. The relevant case for us was that a D3 brane can carry D5 dipole charge; in the right circumstances, background fields (analogous to the electric field above) then cause it to "expand" into a D5 brane wrapping some two-dimensional curve in the geometry.

You can see that in this situation, it is ideal to use the phrase "...the
anti-D3 brane embiggens into a D5 brane wrapping..." and that is roughly the context in which we used the phrase."