"I recently came across a text where the electric dipole moment was represented as "d" instead of the more commonly used "p". The reason behind using "d" here is probably that "dipole moment" begins with a "d". However, it also made me wonder why the most commonly used symbol of electric dipole moment is "p" and not "d". What is the reason behind using "p" to represent electric dipole moment?
Also, is there any historical reason for this?"
I originally asked the above question at the Physics SE (https://physics.stackexchange.com/q/458157). There, a user (@Avantgarde) suggested that I should ask this question here too.
Also, another user (@frapadingue) commented that this "p" is from "p" in polarization. This led me to wonder about the following questions:
Historically, what was studied first - electric polarization in materials or the concept of electric dipole moment? If the concept of electric dipole moment was studied first, then, was the representation of this vector quantity changed later when polarization was discovered?