How do people get scientific theories and units named after them?

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For example, I doubt Georg Ohm declared V = IR shall be known as Ohm’s law and that the unit of resistance will be named after himself in his scientific journal publications. How does the scientific community decide and agree on naming things after people and how long after the particular concept/discovery is made is a formal name given?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

There’s not really a single way this happens, and historically there is a separate story behind almost every law and named unit but generally it goes a bit like this:
Someone will propose some physical relation that they have observed in a published work. Generally this won’t even be given a name in the original text. When people later expand upon this work they might reference it in text as “The relation demonstrated by JarJarAwakens”.

If this relation is demonstrated by others and becomes influential then it’s not uncommon to see it start being referenced as “JarJarAwakens Relation”, or if the correlation is strong enough then JarJarAwakens Law. There is no singular body which makes formal the names of these laws, and in fact many laws have multiple names (E.g Hubble’s law vs The Hubble–Lemaître law).

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