De'vID wrote at Sun Jul 5 01:52:38 PDT 2020:

 

>>DI'raq must be a reference to the physicist Dirac's comment about the

>

>Consider the Nobel Prize in physics in 1955.

 

A little research reveals that the prize went to Willis Lamb, whose ovinely named Lamb shift is related to the Dirac equation!

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamb_shift

"In physics, the Lamb shift, named after Willis Lamb, is a difference in energy between two energy levels ²S_1/2 and ²P_1/2 (in term symbol notation) of the hydrogen atom which was not predicted by the Dirac equation, according to which these states should have the same energy."

 

Ha! So Dirac relates to the tera' DI'raq in two different ways!

By the way, I've figured out two more puns from the novel. 'ughDuq gharghmey are "ugly duckling larvae", and Su'wan ghewmey are "swan birds", because like the protagonist of the Hans Christian Andersen story, a lepidopteran starts its life as an allegedly ugly worm-like caterpillar, and then grows up to be a beautiful butterfly!