Gamma

In Finland, gamma-hydroxybutyrate is usually referred to as gamma.

A Russian brand of oil paints (and perhaps other paints, too - I was unable to find any information about them on the web). Their address is: ОАО <<ГАММА>>, Mockba, 105023, M. Cemehobckaя, 5

I purchased these paints when I was in Moscow in April and May of 2001. I saw then a little in the stores, but not much - most of the stores had western brands of paint. At Izmalosky Park, the same place where I purchased too much camera junk - a Leica Copy and a Kiev 60 - I found these paints.

The tubes that they were in looked cheap, but the price was right - between $1 and $2 for 46ml. tubes, with most of them about a dollar. The numbers below are the prices of the paints, in Rubles, those that have not already rubbed off. There were many more colors, I know, these are just the ones that I still have.

• Azure Blue
• Cadmium Orange 40
• Cadmium Red Deep
• Cadmium Yellow Light 40
• Cadmium Yellow Medium
• Cadmium Yellow Deep 40
• Caput-Mortuum Light 28
• Carbon Black
• Chrome-Cobalt Blueish-Green
• Chromium Oxide (a green) 30
• Cobalt Blue Light 55
• Cobalt Blue Medium 55
• Cobalt Green Deep 30
• Coeruleum (hue.)
• Emerald Green 25
• English Red
• Golden Ochre 25
• Indiho Extra 30
• Indian Red 25
• Karelian Black 25
• Madder Lake Deep 25
• Manganese Violet 55
• Manganese Violet Light 55
• Mars Brown Light 25
• Mars Brown Deep 25
• Mars Yellow Transparent 30
• Naples Lemon
• Naples Red 30
• Ochre Moscow Golden 28
• Ochre Red 19
• Prussian Blue 25
• Russian Green 25
• Sienna Burnt 25
• Ultramarine Deep 30
• Violet Light 25
• Viridian (a green) 25
• Yellow Ochre 20
• Yellow Ochre Light 20

These tubes of oil paint, cheap, silvery in color, with black caps that would break if screwed on too hard, were actually pretty good paints. There appears to be some intention of an exteneded market, the labels in Russian, English, French, and German.

And they were cheap. But for the price, I cannot complain. Some of the paints seemed a bit watery, and the mixtures were inconsistent. You do get what you pay for.

It derives from the Phoenician letter for G, related to Hebrew ג gimel and Arabic ج jim (the pronunciation gim is still used in Egypt). The name means 'camel'.

The letter was adopted into the Etruscan alphabet with the value K, since Etruscan had no G sound. The perpendicular angle shifted to shape < which was then rounded to give the Roman letter C. This was used for both the K and G sounds of Latin, until the slave Spurius Carvilius Ruga added a stroke to form the G. The use of C for G persisted in the names Caius and Cnaeus.

In the Cyrillic alphabet the Greek letter-shape Г is retained.

In Ancient Greek it usually had the pronunciation of G in got, but in some circumstances it had the value of NG in sing. This was before the velar sounds kappa, chi, xi, and gamma itself: so lynx was actually written lygx, and angelos was written aggelos. This habit was borrowed by the Gothic alphabet. It also had this value before mu: so stigma had its first syllable pronounced sting, not stig. This special value of gamma was sometimes given the name agma.

In Modern Greek it developed a fricative pronunciation, a GH sound as in Arabic, or a stronger form of the Spanish sound in luego. A straightened form of this (to harmonize with the Roman alphabet) is used as the International Phonetic Alphabet sign for this sound. Before a front vowel this became palatal, giving in effect a consonantal Y sound. So ancient hagios 'holy' is modern ayos.

In special relativity, gamma (γ) is the symbol for a very common quantity,

 1/sqrt(1 - v^2/c^2)

There are many important uses of γ in relativity. It is the constant of proportionality in time dilation and length contraction. The mechanical energy of a body is E = γmc², which reduces to the famous E=mc² when the particle velocity is zero. Similarly, the relativistic momentum is p=γmv, which reduces to the familiar Newtonian momentum when v<<c. Along with β=v/c, γ appears in many other relativistic situations, including relativistic electromagnetism.

Gam"ma (?), n.

The third letter (Γ, γ = Eng. G) of the Greek alphabet.

© Webster 1913.