What I am doing is:

class Foo
  alias_method :__bar__,:bar
  def bar(*arg)
    #do something
    __bar__(*arg)
  end
end


Is it the proper way to do it?

Or it is better to figure out how many required,optional,block arguments the original method has, and write exactly the same amount of arguments?


Question: abelian higgs vortices
Answer: I expect that this terminology came from an analogy of an analogy. 

Quoting from Quantum Field Theory of Anyons, by Fröhlich and Marchetti (1988), "Particles with real spin and intermediate statistics have been called 'anyons' by Wilczek [1]. He suggested that electrically charged magnetic vortices, occuring in certain Higgs models, may be examples of such particles." 

So certain types of anyons can reasonably be, and have been, called vortices. I looked at the Manton paper, but didn't understand it at all; however, my guess is that the things Manton is calling vortices are related to the electrically charged magnetic vortices mentioned above (and if you consider these just mathematically and not physically, there is no apparent reason that they should be called vortices).

I would welcome corrections from anyone with better knowledge of the historical record (my answer came from knowing about the anyonic vortex terminology and Google).