Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive 6

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Cold fusion

As far as I can tell, the Cold Fusion article is getting more and more pro-Cold Fusion as time passes. I don't have the time or expertise to argue with one of the major proponents of the idea, so I've done the only thing I can think of: delisting it from good articles and tagging it as {{totallydisputed}}. If anyone has any better ideas, please go for it. -- SCZenz 20:01, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

Now there's edit warring over the tag itself. Can you guys keep an eye on the page, so we can at least maintain that? -- SCZenz 20:08, 7 April 2006 (UTC)

LHC

I feel that LHC article is very weak. Any contribution will be appreciated. I also nominated it for Wikipedia:Science collaboration of the week, you can vote for it if you like. þħɥʂıɕıʄʈʝɘɖı 17:08, 9 April 2006 (UTC)

I think that most of the articles about accelerators and detectors are at least weak (if not existent at all).. I don't think they are going to need a collaboration from all Wikipedians right now, but we should do something about them... I'll help as soon as I get some spare time.. :-) [[[User:Tatonzolo|Tatonzolo]] 13:25, 13 April 2006 (UTC)]


Pseudoscience article threads originally from PNA/Physics

(These comments were originally moved to the main page of Wikipedia:WikiProject Pseudoscience by User:Alba. They certainly don't belong there, and they don't belong on that project's talk page, and PNA/Physics has had its discussion threads summarily removed, so this seems the best place to put it. --Christopher Thomas 17:23, 10 April 2006 (UTC))

Notice for members of WikiProject Pseudoscience: PNA is undergoing experimental modification. PNA will become one-stop shopping for all attention needs: relevant portals, wikiprojects, categories, stubs, and requests for cleanup, expansion, and expert attention will all be added, maintained by bot, and transcluded to every interested project. However, this necessitates that discussion of such pages be conducted on project or talk projects. Therefore, I'm pasting relevant comments that no longer have appropriate talk pages here. Thanks for your attention, and I hope the new PNA helps your project keep pseudoscience in its proper place. Alba 12:12, 10 April 2006 (UTC)

  • Aetherometry and associated pages - Could someone with patience and a really large hatchet help to make these fringe scientific sound more like fringe scientific theories rather than the greatest scientific discoveries in the history of the world?? Dragons flight 21:35, Jun 20, 2005 (UTC)
Still on fringe-theory sabbatical after harmonics theory ate a month. I'll add it to the "pages to look at" list, though. --Christopher Thomas 22:01, 20 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Update - still active squabbling going on, so I'm not touching it for now. --Christopher Thomas 6 July 2005 20:38 (UTC)
Page has been deleted, though there are other mentions of the subject within Wikipedia. --Christopher Thomas 20:33, 26 January 2006 (UTC)

Suspected copyvio

I've just come across Supersolid. Most of the current content there was added in one lump by an anonymous editor (and later wikified) and by the writing style looks like it was written for a magazine or at least something other than an encyclopaedia. Another anonymous editor commented on the talk page that it was "just about verbatim ripped from n/s". I didn't know what he meant by "n/s" (New Scientist?), but I googled for the content and came up only with pages derived from the WP article. There are two references, of which one is to a Nature article which you can only read if you have a subscription (which I don't, not being a scientist). The other is evidently not the source.

Since I don't have the time or the inclination to look for a possible source, I'm informing the folks on this WikiProject since I'm assuming lots of you are physicists with subscriptions to publications which might be the source. If it is a copyvio, I'm sure someone can come up with an original article on the subject. Hairy Dude 02:04, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

PNA on WikiProject Physics Page

Is that really usefull, for al the physics PNA stuff to be in two places? Isn't a link enough? What do others think? Karol 07:07, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

wtf? Pages needing attention! --MarSch 14:51, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

Welcome User Brian Josephson (talk · contribs)

Nobel prize-winning Wikipedian. See also Brian David Josephson (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).

And promptly into the breach of controversy ... linas 13:41, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
Indeed, we'll have to watch his edits closely for POV-pushing. ---CH 09:06, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Dark energy and other virtual particle edits by User:Enormousdude

Enormousdude (talk · contribs) has recently edited dark energy, Casimir effect, and possibly other articles to express the associated phenomena in terms of virtual particles. I recall there was a large debate at Talk:Casimir effect over this the last time the subject came up, which resulted in the virtual particle explanation being de-emphasized at that article, as being more a product of one way the math could be performed than a fundamental part of the effect. If User:Linas or someone else who was involved in that discussion wants to track down the relevant pages and see if anything needs correcting, it would be greatly appreciated. I don't have the background to do it. --Christopher Thomas 00:40, 18 April 2006 (UTC)

Also include quantum statistics and photon density. Karol 07:50, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
I've been on a mini-wiki-vacation. I'll take a look. linas 13:45, 18 April 2006 (UTC)
To be clear, the problem of saying a physical effect is "due to virtual particles" is kind of like saying that a derivative is a "delta-epsilon effect". While not exactly wrong, its not exactly right either. Virtual particles are artifacts of perturbation theory. Systems that can be solved exactly without using perturbation theory don't need to have (don't use, don't posses) virtual particles. linas 02:15, 20 April 2006 (UTC)

Plasma cosmology material being inserted into many articles

Tommysun (talk • contribs) seems to be cut-and-pasting the same "doppler shift controversy" paragraph into a significant number of cosmology-related articles. As far as I can tell this is more plasma cosmology material. I've rolled back the grossly misplaced edits, but this could end up being a recurring problem. --Christopher Thomas 05:08, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

NEXAFS and XANES

See Talk:XANES for a discussion about a possible merger and the replacement by User:141.108.20.26 of links to NEXAFS with links to XANES. This smells like yet another blatant attempt at self-promotion. While the phenomenon of people adding links to their own research papers is fairly harmless, I object to their removal of links to existing articles when they do so. (Please note that I have never created any links to or citations of my own research papers!) Clearly Bianconi/141.108.20.26 knew that the NEXAFS article already existed since he/she created XANES since he/she went to the trouble of removing links to the NEXAFS article! Alison Chaiken 19:57, 22 April 2006 (UTC)

Your evidence is thin; that doesn't mean you're wrong, but it does mean that asserting that this is self-promotion may not get anywhere. I'd suggest in the future that you de-emphasize the accusations in favor of fixing the articles so the possible self-promotion goes away. Be bold! -- SCZenz 20:25, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
I see your point but fear that if I'm bold in undoing others' ill-advised changes that I'll start a revert war. It's one thing to boldly create new articles, and another altogether to go ahead and merge XANES into NEXAFS without some thought, especially since "XANES" is an equally valid article title. Answering the high-handedness of others with equal high-handedness doesn't lead to a solution! I can't figure out what behavior will lead to a solution though. At least most of the Wikipedians I've communicated with have been helpful. Alison Chaiken 20:42, 22 April 2006 (UTC)
The funny thing about Wikipedia is that mercilessly editing others' additions isn't all that impolite if the reasons are explained (in this case you'd say merge/redirect because article already exists), but accusing people of having inappropriate motives without mind-bogglingly clear evidence is. That philosophy is the source of my suggestion. If you merge/redirect with an explanation, and someone else reverts you, then they have to explain themselves too. -- SCZenz 03:37, 24 April 2006 (UTC)
I see the wisdom of your advice. User:87.3.31.93 is continuing to expand the XANES article in a knowledgeable way despite the fact that he/she seems to agree that it is a duplicate of NEXAFS. He/she removed the merge template that I put on the XANES page. I am inclined to put it back since the articles need eventually to be merged, I don't care in which direction. No one disputes that NEXAFS and XANES describe the same technique. I'm not even aware of the history of why there are two names. Alison Chaiken 02:58, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I put the merge template back on NEXAFS and XANES and it has been removed again, so now we have a full-blown revert war. Perhaps I should just go ahead and merge the articles myself but that might start a real conflagration. I'm busy with something else right now anyway. Alison Chaiken 04:41, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I certainly think merging the articles is appropriate, in some manner, since everyone has agreed that the two words describe the same thing. What the tile should be is a content dispute. If Dr. Bianconi is indeed editing the article and citing his own papers, it would appear that he has some cause to (if indeed he wrote the first paper on the technique); when the content being added really is notable, violations of WP:AUTO are more forgivable. However, one thing that's muddying the waters is the multiple IP addresses agreeing with each other; I've asked politely on Talk:XANES for them to straighten out which of them are the same person. (Although editing from more than one user name or IP is not forbidden on Wikipedia, using sockpuppets/meatpuppets to influence a content dispute is.) In any case, I would suggest that you look at the merits of the claims made on Talk:XANES and decide what action to take independent of your (reasonable) dislike of self-promotion; if you still think there's no reason for a name change, then by all means continue discussing, or consider whether there's a neutral way to use both terms in the article (e.g. possibly refer to it consistently as NEXFAS/XANES regardless of the article title). -- SCZenz 07:40, 25 April 2006 (UTC)


Some time long ago, the people who came up with the names "XANES" and "NEXAFS" were probably having a spat, but I don't know about that history and don't care. Having just one article called "XANES" is fine with me; the important thing is to have just one article. The other folks seem to be of the opinion that we should have two, which is ridiculous. Having said that, the new XANES article is pretty good. While the Bianconi papers may be worth citing (I don't really know), the lack of citations to other works or to the major monograph by Jo Stohr in the new article is a problem that a merge would solve. Thanks for stepping in. Alison Chaiken 14:11, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I see that User:141.108.20.26 has now removed the {{wikify}} tags put on XANES by User:Pearle and User:Waggers. The author of XANES (and his/her associated sock puppets) show little interest in the conventions of Wikipedia or in others' well-intended suggestions about the contents of their articles. Alison Chaiken 14:16, 2 May 2006 (UTC)
Alison, thanks for the heads-up on my talk page. Removing cleanup tags without giving a valid reason is vandalism, and you are perfectly entitled to revert it. The 3-revert rule, which is the main handler for edit wars, makes an excemption for vandalism-fighting, so don't be afraid of getting into trouble over edit warring for undoing vandalism. I've replaced the wikify tag, and also replaced the merge tag. Waggers 08:01, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

RfA

I've nominated one of Wikipedia's regular physics editors, Keenan Pepper, for adminship. If you've had experience with this editor and an opinion of Keenan's qualifications, please visit the RfA and voice your opinions. -lethe talk + 06:34, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

Help with 4π detector article name

I am planning, in the near future, on finally writing an article on the general concept of the typical concentric-rings-of-different-detectors-covering-as-much-solid-angle-as-possible design for collider detectors. (I'm going to include history as well as generally how they work, something I wrote a lot about for ATLAS experiment even though it's not really particular to ATLAS.) The problem is, I'm not sure what to name the article. I've heard 4π detector as the general term, but that's kind of a lousy name for a Wikipedia article because it assumes a knowledge of steradians. Any suggestions? -- SCZenz 03:33, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

you could use the term Hermetic High Energy Physics Detectors or something like that.. Tatonzolo 08:15, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Anti-relativity

Utter and complete nonsense. It's so depressing. Revert, AfD or RfC? Unfortunately article RfC is next to pointless in the last time I've seen it in action. --Pjacobi 21:09, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

I'm leaning to AfD, though I think I could be persuaded. Railing against relativity is a common enough stance for crackpots that I think a case could be made to have an article about it. Though in its current state, the article needs work. -lethe talk + 00:44, 25 April 2006 (UTC)
I would AfD. It seems really non-notable, incoherent, and quite insulting in a few places. I deleted a few of the most flagrant violations of NPOV, such as apparently suggesting that researchers at DESY murdered someone, and claiming that HEP researchers are "mislead (sic) and indoctrinated scribes". --Philosophus 03:54, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Anti-relativity --Pjacobi 08:58, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

More edits by User:Enormousdude

This time he's done a heavy edit of potential energy. I don't feel up to thoroughly checking it yet, though I may if nobody else does. It looks like he didn't quite get the original paradigm being described, and so substituted a different one that's arguably less flexible, and didn't follow the description of the (non-hollow) sphere example. --Christopher Thomas 19:59, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

He's also messed with Casimir effect again, though only one change looks questionable (altered the statement about the cosmological constant to handwave away the problem). --Christopher Thomas 20:05, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
He was sort-of right in the Casimir effect, as to how infinities are treated in practical calculations. I re-tweaked and merged the general idea in. linas 04:51, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
The incorrect math he removed from potential energy was, in fact, incorrect. (I can't figure out what the original author was trying to do, either!) I haven't looked other than that. -- SCZenz 20:33, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
His edits to potential energy are ok, except that the article is a complete mess in any case. Also we ought to figure out what he means by "elastic force" and replace the term with a definition. -- SCZenz 20:36, 26 April 2006 (UTC)
From what I can tell after a second look, the original author was trying to be too smart for their own good. They were trying to integrate over shells of matter in a solid sphere of uniform density, but botched setting up that equation, and didn't seem to realize that it was unnecessary to do this when by the conditions of the problem they were looking for the potential outside the sphere anyways. They were also using Earth as an example without explicitly stating that they were approximating it as a sphere of uniform density (the usual simple model treats the core and mantle as having different, fixed densities, while more accurate models use a parabolic fit for them, if I recall correctly). --Christopher Thomas 21:17, 26 April 2006 (UTC)

Update - I've taken another look at the math, after it was added (again), and while it's done in pretty much the most confusing possible way, it's valid. I've added an extensive section on the talk page discussing this and showing an alternate, much simpler, derivation.

Unfortunately, I finally figured out what was going on _after_ reverting the re-addition. Argh.

If anyone more awake than I am right now wants to take a stab at putting something easier to follow in place of the removed equations, please do so. --Christopher Thomas 06:57, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

Most of his edits appear to be mostly right, and often rather confusing. C'est la vie. linas 01:35, 1 May 2006 (UTC)

Bell's spaceship paradox

Anybody volunteering to give Bell's spaceship paradox and Talk:Bell's spaceship paradox a look? User:Rod Ball (most time edititing anonymously) is terribly confused about what proper times and proper accelarations are and now has reached the stage of the text books are wrong, I know what's right. Perhaps my attempts at explaining the issue were not brilliant prose and I'm rather tired of the topic, as it was a months long PITA on German Wikipedia. --Pjacobi 09:29, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

This is a bit late, but I completely rewrote Bell's spaceship paradox a week or so ago, as well as the background article Rindler coordinates (adapted to Rindler observers, a family of constant acceleration observers). In the past few days I completely rewrote Born coordinates (adapted to Langevin observers, who are rigidly rotating around an axis of cylindrical symmetry) and plan to use that to rewrite Ehrenfest paradox. ---CH 08:41, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Special relativity

There's been a vigorous dispute at Talk:Special relativity for about a week or so now. The disagreement seems to be over whether Einstein postulated that the one-way or round-trip speed of light was invariant. I know there are lurkers here who are much more familiar with the topic than I am; if you're feeling up for another debate-slog, this would be a relatively civil one that needs looking at. --Christopher Thomas 22:56, 27 April 2006 (UTC)

In my understanding the one way velocity is purely conventional (but of course heavily hinted by Occam's Razor) and not subject to any measurement. I've improvised a stub Einstein synchronisation some time ago. --Pjacobi 00:05, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
In my understanding it is the instantaneous speed of light which is a constant. --MarSch 10:54, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

Structure factor

I've created an article called Structure factor. It would be good if someone could take a look and suggest changes and expansions. O. Prytz 03:14, 28 April 2006 (UTC)

Yet more supporting evidence that if I'm lazy enough eventually everything on my to do list will get done by other people.
It is a concept in need of diagrams. If I can come up with a helpful one I'll work it up this afternoon. — Laura Scudder ☎ 16:29, 28 April 2006 (UTC)
The article is more or less copied from the appropriate part of the Electron diffraction article, so it could use some expanding. A diagram could be helpful, but I'm not sure what it should be. O. Prytz 06:27, 30 April 2006 (UTC)
Besides what you've included, I'd like structure factor to contain some text and a table about the close-packed planes of the various Bravais lattices. The fact that structure factors predict the primary orientations of polycrystalline thin films is interesting and pertinent. I'd work on the article myself except that I'm about to go out of town. Thanks for taking a crack at this article, as it has been on my to-do list for a long time. I think it's exactly the kind of fundamental concept that students or aging scientists like me might well consult Wikipedia for. Alison Chaiken 04:55, 3 May 2006 (UTC)
Added some content, and changed notation to make it consistent with the norm. Lex Kemper 8:44, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

...for beginners

Three of our articles got "...for beginners" forks, see [1]:

Two of them were on (somewhat inconclusive) AfDs:

In my not so humble opinion, short, accessable introductions should go into the main articles and longer, textbook-style stuff, should be at WikiBooks. But, unfortunately, my opinon doesn't set policy, see I'd like to hear some comments on this issue. And anywaym the Introduction articles may need some proofreading. --07:56, 3 May 2006 (UTC)

These intro articles are structured like articles instead of textbooks. They are not long and deep enough to go to WikiBooks, but not anywhere near short enough to go into the main article. These articles help keep technical treatments and explanatory treatments separate, keeping Wikipedia useful for both experts and laypersons. Loom91 06:14, 4 May 2006 (UTC)

I agree. If anything, I think our error is most often in thinking that the technical treatment is the "real" article. Also, these articles look well-written. -- SCZenz 18:44, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
That is the direction I'm thinking. If the main article of an important field in physics is too technical for a general audience, there is something wrong. I'd prefer better accessable main articles and technical stuff relegated into the more specialised articles.
And the intro-articles do have some textbook style in them, but we can work on this.
Heck, if Einstein himself managed to write accessable articles for the Volks-Reclam, why don't we aim to do so?
Pjacobi 20:31, 4 May 2006 (UTC)
Whether the introductory or the technical article is the "main" article is a trivial issue not of much consequence. I will personally prefer that a formal technical approach ("descriptive") approach is taken in the main article while the forked article uses a more "getting-the-point-across" approach. Loom91 08:18, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

If an article is harder to understand than necessary, then that article needs to be fixed. I don't see any justification for forking, because I don't think the content of these articles is really of such disparate difficulty levels. --MarSch 10:42, 5 May 2006 (UTC)

I disagree. How hard an article is to understand depends on the target audience. I don't think having two versions targetted at people with very different physics and mathematics backgrounds is unreasonable. In fact, I'd welcome more of this for some of the pure-mathematics topics. For a sufficiently specialized topic, an article that is comprehensible to a beginner is likely to be uninformative or even wrongly-informative to someone with expertise in the topic, and an article that is both correct and informative to a specialist will usually be incomprehensible to a beginner.
I'm not saying this should be done for _all_ articles, but I can see good reasons for doing it for many of them. The alternative is to devote a lot of space to explanations targetted at different audiences in one article. While this seems reasonable for cases where it doesn't greatly lengthen the article, for specialized and/or technical subjects it takes a lot more than just a brief introductory paragraph to do this, decreasing readability for all audiences. Hence, the tradeoff between making an article more understandable and forking it. --Christopher Thomas 18:06, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
Introduction to general relativity has recently been marred by much misinformation and many misleading statements added by Juansempere (talk · contribs). I am too exhausted re other cruft control to help out but I briefly drew attention to a few of the problems I noticed on that talk page. ---CH 20:46, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Conjugate quantities

The article Conjugate quantities is listed for deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Conjugate quantities. I tried to edit it into something sufficiently decent that it might be kept, but am not an expert. Please contribute to the article and/or the discussion. --LambiamTalk 16:20, 8 May 2006 (UTC)

I did a REDIRECT to conjugate variables. linas 13:36, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Low energy nuclear reaction

The article Low energy nuclear reactions (ofshoot of cold fusion) needs serious npoving. I'm sure there are people far more knowledgeable than me here who can help. --Deglr6328 01:35, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

A cursory glance suggests that most of this could just be merged into cold fusion. However, it looks like it was actually created by extraction _from_ that article, for reasons that aren't clear to me. --Christopher Thomas 02:15, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

Flouron Emission Rays

This areticle is up at AfD.ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! - review me 07:15, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

I especially like the bit where it claims mercury atoms (mass about 2e+11 eV/C^2) emit gamma rays with energies on the order of 1e+18 eV. --Christopher Thomas 17:29, 9 May 2006 (UTC)

More Cycles stuff, and M-Theory stuff

Two (thankfully) unrelated items that may bear watching:

  • A new user, Cycles (talk • contribs), has started posting as of Tuesday, focusing on Cycles Theory-related articles. Points that are suspicious are that they only became active shortly after the AfD mess died down, and that they're displaying suspicious mastery of things like citation templates despite having made less than a dozen edits so far. No discernable abuse yet, but probably should be watched as a potential sock puppet of existing players.

I'll continue helping out where I can, but my cosmology background isn't strong enough to vet the articles in the second item. --Christopher Thomas 03:52, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

I've reverted all of his brane edits, which made some decent articles and stubs into a giant confused mess. It would be nice if editors were more restrained in making content changes in subjects they don't understand at all. If H0riz0n's only edit had been the change he made from 4D to 3D in the Brane Cosmology article, I would have though he was a vandal. In addition, I had no idea the M-theory article was so horribly written! I might try to rewrite it after this quarter is over, but I am terribly busy right now and shouldn't even be making these edits. --Constantine Evans 06:23, 11 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the prompt response. --Christopher Thomas 14:08, 11 May 2006 (UTC)

Virial Theorem

I just noticed that the Virial Theorem page has a giant copyright warning on it. I don't have Goldstein's Mechanics book, so I can't check the issue in question myself. If anyone wants to help figure out the issure and/or write the page from scratch, it'd be appreciated. KristinLee 22:08, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Anybody in AfD mood?

I'm too tired to AfD -- any volunteers to nominate Unitary field theory, and possibly the other contributions of User: Roger Anderton? --Pjacobi 21:27, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

let's see if a prod takes. -lethe talk + 21:43, 14 May 2006 (UTC)
The only other non-reverted contribution is a biography page on Leo baranski. Quick-link via user template, for easier tracking: Roger Anderton (talk • contribs). --Christopher Thomas 21:51, 14 May 2006 (UTC)

The prod tag was removed by Harald88 (talk • contribs), along with most of the web site links. I've restored the prod tag. --Christopher Thomas 16:20, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

This is against prod policy. If anyone removes the prod tag, and we still want to delete, then we have to take it to AfD proper. Removing prod tags is not allowed, and the closing admin is not to delete if the prod tag didn't stay on continuously for 5 days. -lethe talk + 17:22, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for the note. I've read up on Wikipedia:Proposed deletion, and will attempt to follow proper procedure in the future. --Christopher Thomas 18:33, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
I've redirected to Albert Einstein#Generalized theory --Philosophus <sup>T 18:15, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

This user has also recently edited Lancelot Law Whyte, though from what I can tell the edit is valid (added a list of authored and co-authored books). --Christopher Thomas 17:52, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

AfD Nomination Leo baranski

I've nominated the article Leo baranski for deletion; see Articles for deletion/Leo baranski. --LambiamTalk 12:46, 15 May 2006 (UTC)

xstructure links

I see steady effort to link many articles to http://xstructure.inr.ac.ru/ (e.g. [2]).

Before discussing, whether these links are reasonably based on their content, I'd like raise a formal issue: At least to me, this site displays popunder ads. I judge this to be very annoying.

Pjacobi 17:24, 17 May 2006 (UTC)

Anti-relativity and Modern Galilean relativity

I thought I'd let you all know that User:KraMuc, due to suggestions made to him, attempted to write an article on modern Galilean relativity at Anti-relativity. I speedied it as recreated deleted material, but he pointed out that it was different content. As it is different and some willingness to move parts of the old material was expressed at AfD, I have undeleted this new article and moved it to modern Galilean relativity. — Laura Scudder ☎ 21:15, 18 May 2006 (UTC)

So far, he seems to be presenting the subject in a more neutral light, though the article will still need NPOV'ing work by other editors. --Philosophus T 22:12, 18 May 2006 (UTC)
The article should clearly state that Galilean relativity is firmly regarded as cranky by the mainstream. Galilean dynamics was founded by Petr Beckman, an EE by training, and has published the likes of Tom Van Flandern of Face on Mars infamy. Hadronic Journal was founded by Ruggero Maria Santilli, who has also published a hysterical anti-Einstein rant. See Did Einstein Cheat?, a Salon article by John Farrell, and Wired 6.03: Breaking the Law of Gravity, a Wired article by Charles Platt. ---CH 09:15, 22 May 2006 (UTC)
This article is now thorougly cranky, and KraMuc has not responded well in talk page discussions. I am too exhausted to try to reason with him, unfortunately. In any case, I think a group effort is needed to control this. ---CH 20:48, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Unified field theory

Right now, the unified field theory page comes across as being a more badly-written version of theory of everything. I was under the impression that the term "unified field theory" referred to a specific class of model that attempted ToE-style unification. If an expert on the subject could take a look at it, it would be greatly appreciated (the article needs heavy editing for tone at minimum). --Christopher Thomas 05:08, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

And there is also Albert Einstein#Generalized theory and Classical unified field theories, and the term " Unitary field theory". It would be great if someone knowledgeable about these subjects could clarify the relationships. --LambiamTalk 17:33, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
I've asked around a bit, and I am not so sure that unified field theory and theory of everything are well-defined terms. Thus the articles should probably be merged, and it should be made clear that they are popular rather than technical terms. Note however that Grand Unified Theory is something different, well-defined, and the article is in good shape. -- SCZenz 18:55, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
I agree. Unless someone has a very good argument otherwise, let's merge Unified Field Theory with Theory of Everything. RK 00:59, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Likewise, and neutralize to remove slant toward cranky "theory" promoted by Roger D. Anderton, who maintains a cranky website. ---CH 07:04, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
I've only ever seen "theory of everything" used as an umbrella term to refer to any theory that unifies all four forces. This gives it a consistent, though broad, definition in my (admittedly limited) experience. I'd thought UFT was similarly specific (a QFT that was a ToE), but apparently there's ambiguity over this. I strongly suggest that if a merge takes place, the final article is at "theory of everything", as this is the more general term. --Christopher Thomas 07:16, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

In my understanding, a "unified field theory" is the "old-fashioned" term, commonly used in 20th century physics literature, and is the appropriate term for any unification attempts before 1985; this is what these theories called themselves. Sometime around 1985 or so, the term "theory of everything" became popular, possibly due to pop lit by the Hawking or Wienberg Stevens? The term was not used at all in the earlier theories, and is used heavily only in current papers. Thus, ToE, as I know it, only applies to supergravity, strings, branes, M-theory, and not the earlier theories. Similarly, I'd prefer to keep these two articles apart; for this and many other reasons (not the least of which is the former is more staid, historical and scholarly, while the latter is pop and hip and the target of crankier thinking) linas 13:58, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

If we keep the articles separate, there has to be a clear and (to non-physicists) comprehensible difference between the terms. -- SCZenz 18:14, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

AfD Derivation of the partition function

Could anybody with some knowledge of statistical mechanics please comment at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Derivation of the partition function? Thanks. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 08:28, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

That deletion discussion is solid evidence that we should avoid AfD as much as possible. If someone steps up to improve the article, well and good—if not, we can always redirect to Partition function (statistical mechanics) in the interim to sweep the dubious material under the rug, so to speak. -- SCZenz 08:44, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Polarizable vacuum

Amusingly, some time back the pltn13.pacbell.net anon, a suspected sock of permabanned Jack Sarfatti (talk · contribs) (who should not be editing WP at all) edited this article to add a bit of scorn concerning Hal Puthoff (apparently Sarfatti and Puthoff had a falling out some time ago).

Must more seriously, a new single purpose user, Ibison (talk · contribs) has completely rewritten this article in a manner which I regard as violating WP:NPOV. Even worse, Ibison is presumably in real life Michael Ibison, who is listed as an employee of the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, an organization apparently founded by Hal Puthoff which has no relation with the reputable Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. Indeed, the Pufhoff insitute is apparently a subsidiary of Earth Tech International, Inc. in Austin, TX, a company which promotes the theories of Hal Puthoff. Indeed, it would apparently not be inaccurate to say that Michael Ibison is an employee of Hal Puthoff. If true, this would appear to raise issues related to WP:VAIN WP:NPOV WP:RS.

No doubt everyone here knows that Puthoff's speculations about "metric engineering" are generally regarded as fringe science at best, but see also Eugene Podkletnov and the article from Wired by Charles Platt cited there, for starters. (Puthoff is claiming among other things that gravitation is an electromagnetic phenomenon.) ---CH 08:52, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

Ibison here. The preceding commentator incorrectly infers that because I am employed at the same institution as Harold Puthoff, my edits are biased towards the veracity of PV. But on the contrary, it should be clear from the Wiki edit history of the PV entry, plus papers I posted on arXiv, that I believe PV is incompatible with observation.

Introduction to general relativity

Throught he actions of one anon user who thinks Wikipedia is the space for writing his own textbook, has been making this article, intended as a non-technical introduction to the topic for laymen, into a highly technical and mathematical treatment of the topic using advanced concepts such as metric tensors and pseudo-Riemannian manifolds. It is in need of immediate attention from an expert who can ruthlessly edit the article and bring it upto a introductory level. This is a plea for help, please rescue this article from its steady death-march! Loom91 07:15, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Is a General Relativity ToE accepted as a useful approach?

It seems to me that there is a contradiction within this article. The article confidently states that:

The only mainstream candidate for a theory of everything at the moment is superstring theory / M-theory; current research on loop quantum gravity may eventually play a fundamental role in a TOE, but that is not its primary aim

Yet a few paragraphs away we find it stated that:

There have been several attempts to advance the general theory of relativity as a theory of everything. As mentioned above, Einstein was responsible for one of these: in collaboration with Rosen he attempted to model particles as tiny wormholes, hence the term Einstein-Rosen Bridge.... Such theories face a number of hurdles: the creation of wormholes changes the topology of spacetime by creating a new "handle" which implies violations of causality (see Hadley [2]), and the general theory of relativity predicts its own breakdown at a Gravitational singularity by theorems of Stephen Hawking and Roger Penrose. A recent effort to surmount this hurdle notes that the equivalence principle can be applied along curves rather than at a single point (Iliev [3]), ....

Should, then, we revise the statement to say something like:

There are currently two mainstream candidates for a theory of everything. The candidate with the most attention by professional physicists is superstring theory / M-theory. (current research on loop quantum gravity may eventually play a fundamental role in a TOE, but that is not its primary aim.) However, another active field of research - pursued by a smaller group of professional physicists - is to use Einstein's general theory of relativity as a theory of everything....

Is this wording more accurate? Or are the number of people following the latter GR path so small as to be not worth stating in this fashion? Any thoughts would be appreciated? RK 15:58, 21 May 2006 (UTC)

As a graduate student in high energy theory, I certainly haven't heard of any substantial work on this "GR alone as a TOE" approach. I'm not sure what evidence exists to support the idea at all, to be honest. Certainly the vast majority of people working on LQG (which is just aiming to be quantized GR) don't expect it to explain anything beyond gravity on its own. If the "GR as a TOE" folks were making a substantial impact on the field, I would expect that attitude to be different. If anyone has substantial references to the contrary, please do share them, but I would be tempted to refrain from mentioning any ongoing work on the "GR as a TOE" idea under the "no original research" policy here.--Steuard 03:33, 22 May 2006 (UTC)

General relativity is not a candidate for a Theory of Everything. One of the goals of a TOE is to provide a unified description of fundamental interactions. Einstein and Schrodinger spent part of their time trying to develop a unified field theory that would unify electromagnetism with gravity. This Einstein-Schrodinger theory isn't part of General Relativity and it also doesn't unify physical interactions. It exploits some useful analogies between the tensor fields governing gravity and electromagnetism, but doesn't truly unify them. GR and Einstein-Schrodinger Theory say nothing whatsoever about nuclear interactions. There is no such thing as "GR as TOE", because GR is only a theory of gravity. Tomm

My understanding of the idea being discussed here (which I'll admit I hadn't heard of before in any serious context) was as a notion that various topological effects in gravity alone might give rise to particles and the other forces. As I said above, I'm not aware of any mainstream work on such a model, and it goes against the general understanding of what GR describes by physicists in related fields.--Steuard 13:40, 23 May 2006 (UTC)
I've never heard of this program, and I would suggest it be deleted as a violation of NOR. On the other hand, it's got lots of citations from the arxiv. I read several of the abstracts, and not a single one of them mentions a general relativity ToE. In fact, other than the mention that particles can be modeled as wormholes, the text in question doesn't really convince me that this approach is actually being considered as a ToE. Do they think it will be able to predict the gauge group, and the number of generations, the mass, and the hierarchy problem? If not, then it ain't a ToE. What we need here is a citation for a scientist who thinks this thing may become a ToE. Otherwise delete. -lethe talk + 14:02, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Other ToEs?

Aside from superstring theory (and related M-theory, branes, etc.) are there any approaches in physics to the theory of anything? Or are superstrings the only feasible path actually being studied by professional physicists? I am aware of Woit's "Not Even Wrong" website and upcoming book, but surely he isn't raging against superstrings without proposing a few alternate paths, right? (Maybe not...) I haven't been able to find any info at all on physicists working on ToE's outside of superstrings, so if this is the case (for the moment?) then the article should reflect this. Maybe we should remove the GR topology, under our policy against No Original Research, and not include it again unless someone can offer peer-reviewed references (or at least a few ArXive papers) on this topic. RK 01:00, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Not Even Wrong
My understanding was that part of the point of trying to quantize gravity was the hope that doing so would point the way towards a gauge theory formulation that unified all of the forces (instead of just the three we already have quantum theories for). This wouldn't make LQG or any other quantum gravity a ToE itself, just a stepping stone towards one. --Christopher Thomas 07:19, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
Please don't bring the politics of string theory onto this page; Peter Woit doesn't deserve your jabs. But yes, any avenue of research we discuss ought to be citable from some papers. Try using the {{citeneeded}} tag before actually deleting material, so that whoever wrote it has a change to note their source. -- SCZenz 08:30, 25 May 2006 (UTC)
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