This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
I am not sure what is to be done about the fact that there are so many ways to categorize elementary particles. In particular, a top quark could be listed as a quark, a fermion, and a subatomic particle, as well as under particle physics and Quantum chromodynamics. This is too many. What should be done? One possibility is that we get rid of categories like quark and fermion entirely, and just make sure each particle's relationship to those definitions is well-documented in Template:elementary. Any thoughts? -- SCZenz 00:01, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
Somebody just went through and put a bunch of antiparticles into Category:Antimatter which is dedicated to things related to antimatter in fiction. I think this is sad after all the effort that's been put into paring down the number of categories that the particles are in, but what do other people think? -- SCZenz 06:05, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I put Category:Quarkonium up for deletion, see Wikipedia:Categories for deletion#Category:Quarkonium, since it is empty and I could only find two articles to place in the category {including Quarkonium } Salsb 15:51, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
I have made the changes discussed below. Template:Elementary now lists the SM particles, the Higgs boson, the graviton, and links to List of particles#Hypothetical particles. That section of the List of particles, which I just reorganized a bit, seems to have all the SUSY particles there were before and more. If there are other particles people want articles on, I think they should be added to the particle list page. -- SCZenz 18:48, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, you misunderstand why I dislike navigating with templates. I think that categories provide a superior navigational structure to templates, (as the above conversation about gluinos already makes clear). But I doubt this argument will bear fruit, so I'll stop vocalizing on this. linas 23:52, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
"Other hypothetical particles" should list axion as well; CAST is the current interesting experiment for this. linas 00:11, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Template:Composite has three entries -- exotic meson, tetraquarks and hybrids -- all of which redirect to exotic meson. Should these be split into three articles, or should the template list non-quark model mesons, or just exotic meson ? Salsb 00:45, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
A whole bunch of quotes about Tesla's philosophy of rotating magnetic fields were just put on Magnetic field by User:Reddi. I may be sensative about Tesla in particular, since the relativity-denying crowd seems to like him, but I don't think that long quotes on the philosophy of one aspect of the subject are appropriate for the article. Thoughts? -- SCZenz 18:16, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
How about this for a solution: stop making rotating magnetic field be a redirect, and turn it into a full-fledged article? The article magnetic field could then say something like See main article rotating magnetic field for more information. linas 23:44, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I think this list could use some cleaning, but I'm working on something else right now. Karol 08:42, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
I think this may be crank material, but I don't know enough to tell. Please review. (Also listed at WP:PNA). JesseW 01:49, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Firstly, though I have a strong interest, IANAP and I'm officially crap at math. So, I need the help of someone here (if they would be so kind). I have been reverting additions to criticality accident and others for quite some time which insist on attributing the infamous "blue flash" associated with these accidents to cherenkov radiation. This is a common mistake even on purportedly reputable internet sites concerning the issue. I think it is quite clear that the blue glow seen in air during these events does not occur because of the Cherenkov effect but instead to direct ionization and fluorescence of the air. The only resonable source of Cherenkov light from a fission event is beta particles in air (yes? I mean alphas and positrons are stopped SOOO easliy and heavy ions have NO chance of reaching relativistic velocities.....right?) and because air is so tenuous the velocity of the betas would have to be very close to the speed of light (>99.97% c) in order for Cherenkov light to occur. Here's my problem then: I do not know how to convert eV to velocity for electrons (or any particle for that matter! :) so that I can say with certainty that "only beta particles exceeding X MeV are capable of producing Cherenkov light in air and therefore since there are few (none?) beta emitting isotopes which produce betas w/ energies greater than X MeV, this is a highly unlikely cause for blue light seen in the air during a criticality event". Can someone help me? I would very much appreicate it!! Thanks. :) -- Deglr6328 09:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
I've put Bogdanov Affair on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics. The article got a heavy amount of editing since the Bogdanovs themselves (if this claim is correct) tried to put it "right". Currently the article is protected. Confusingly Lubos Motl recently spoke in favour of the Bogdanovs [1] whereas Peter Woit unsurprisingly isn't amused [2]. -- Pjacobi 17:20, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
A new user, Markdroberts, is contributing stuff to physics articles. Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of cleanup to do after him, as this user has no idea of how to use wiki markup properly.
I cleaned up Finsler manifold, Lanczos tensor, Perfect fluid. and Higgs mechanism, then got tired of it. Several more are left: Rotation curve, Isolated physical system, Asymptotically flat spacetime. The articles Geodesic deviation equation and Signature change seems to have already been cleaned up by other people.
Also, physicists, could you take a look at the correctness of these articles? I found Finsler manifold to miss words from a sentence, and I can't understand what it wants to say. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov 17:50, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at Aether Physics Model and its subpage APM Physical Dimensions. To me it seems quackery, but it would be useful if a specialist could check to see if it should be brought to VfD. - SimonP 20:24, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
This category was getting messy, as was the subcat on magnetism, so I reorganized them. The subcat on electricity needs to be done as well, its still up for delection, so I haven't touched it yet. I'd appreciate comments if anyone wants to check it out. thanks Salsb 14:22, August 16, 2005 (UTC)
Electromagnetic induction is being continually reverted by User:Sidam to unreadable, misformatted original-research psuedoscientific nonsense. He is now restoring the text without using his user name, presumably to avoid the three revert rule, so we may need more assistance in keeping the page in the correct form. It appears that he has also tried to put similar text on other pages before, and eventually was thwarted. -- SCZenz 17:46, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
After a brief hiatus, it seems Sidam is back at it again. Ugh. -- SCZenz 18:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
If you're wondering why I've been changing silly cosmetic things on list of particles, I've been trying to pretty it up a bit in response to suggestions after User:Merovingian nominated it as a featured list. Go to Talk:List of particles to see where to go to support it. -- SCZenz 22:24, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
I just stumbled into this in the physics category. Maybe someone would like to spiff it up? I'm on vacation :P Karol 07:40, September 3, 2005 (UTC)
May please somebody have a look at dynamical friction? And Talk:Dynamical friction? IMHO it concentrates on an effect which is disputed at best (dynamical friction causing the red shift) and misses details from areas where dynamical friction really is important (galaxy evolution). -- Pjacobi 10:49, September 4, 2005 (UTC)
Exactly - the first part is not bad but the stuff on redshifts is nonsense. The loss of energy by the photon would be very small, and if the effect mattered at all the images of distant objects would be horribly blurred. Also the time dilatation has been confirmed for the envelope of the photons - i.e. distant supernovae are not only redshifted, but the light curve is stretched in time.
One should indeed add material on the effects of dynamical friction on the evolution of galaxies, star clusters, and the pre-planetary disk. Dynamical friction has been invoked by the people behind the "giant impact" moon theory, to return the earth-moon system to a low eccentricity orbit - the giant whack would make for an eccentric one. Sorry, due to a health problem in the family I may not have time. Pdn 06:56, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
You may want to comment at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Modified Newtonian dynamics/archive1. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 18:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I probably should have just #REDIRECTED this article to Heisenberg picture, but instead, I listed it on VfD. Not sure why I bothered. I guess my brain is muddled after trying to clean up Category:Quantum mechanics (again). linas 22:02, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
It seems there is a basic problem with categories in physics and chemistry. I don't see directly how to solve this but I am awaiting your comments. The problem is that in physics, usually, the name of a field covers its theoretical as well as experimental aspects like for example atomic physics, nuclear physics, molecular physics and so on. But there are exceptions like quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry or quantum field theory which are purely theoretical fields. When one tries to categorize this one can obtain that atomic physics or nuclear physics are subfields of quantum mechanics or maybe of quantum chemistry (for atomic physics) because theoretical atomic physics and nuclear physics are fields of quantum mechanics. This is particulary true for scattering. Scattering theory is a clear subfield of quantum mechanics but this is not the case for the phenomenology of scattering which can be seen as a subfield of atomic, molecular, nuclear or particle physics. If you still follow you understand that having an unclear editorial line with respect to this leads to the claim that Scattering can be a subcategory of atomic physics and a subsubcategory of quantum mechnaics while at the same time it is a subcategory of quantum mechanics. This of course leads to nonsense. A possible answer to this paradox could be to split atomic physics into theoretical and experimental atomic/molecular physics. Theoretical atomic/molecular physics would be a subcategory of quantum chemistry and quantum chemistry a subcategory of quantum mechanics which would be in turn a subfield of theoretical physics. Maybe the best way to proceed would be to put somewhere -- why not here? -- a tree of categories for physics and chemistry which would make the editorial line clear -- which ever we decide.-- 131.220.68.177 07:52, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
The thing to keep in mind is that Wikiproject Categories is not infalliable, and their ideas are not policy. I'm going to take back my previous willingness to reorganize physics article along their guidlines. Linas, I approve very much of your comments on User_talk:SeventyThree and on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Categories. Their ideas may simply not be relevant to physics, and we police our own categorization rather well. Is there more work to be done fixing SeventyThree's edits that I can help with? -- SCZenz 01:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
I thought it would be a good idea to have the possibility of telling other participants what pages we think need attention at the moment, so I've made the physicists' watchlist. Tell me what you think, does it seems helpfull? I've added Antimatter now, since it seemd a little science-fiction-like; maybe also Antiparticle, but I haven't read it, because I'm on vacation and don't have time. Karol 17:20, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
Process physics seems to be in need of a NPOV check and additional cleanup. Fredrik | talk 12:36, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
Gack. Were it not for the university reference, I'd call this pure, unadulterated pseudophysics. Hell, even with the university reference, its still unadulterated pseudoscience. My patented smell-o-meter finds the following problems:
-- linas 18:17, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
This article started ringing a bell ... so I googled. I have a partial explanation for the mixture of legit/pseudo physics seen here. Circa 2000, Reg Cahill and Chris Klinger iterated a random matrix of some kind, with some extra non-linear terms, and found some kind of phase transition ... It was noted that the the result looked like a lattice with random connectivity, and that the nearest-neighbor connectivity was three-dimensional. The claim was made that this was a model of 3D space (explaining why space is 3D), and that "mass" appeared somehow naturally, and also that there were quantum-like effects of some kind ... It actually sounded pretty interesting, and sounded like more-or-less legit math, although it was clear that it would take a lot more work to turn this into a full-fledged physical theory. After some googling, I've discovered that these are the same people I'd heard about.
(FWIW, random matices are fairly hot in physics, being applied to both models of the nucleus, and to various quantum gravity models, including loop quantum gravity. And lets not forget the statistical distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta are modelled by a random matrix as well).
I found one reference (below) to the actual hard math behind this thing (although it looks weak). Also, it was clear from the original description that the 3D connectivity was "novel and interesting" but that clearly, a lot had to be done to turn this into something that was compatible with quantum mechanics and/or turn it into something that explained mass/intertia & was consistent with special relativity. I can't find refs to how this was done.
Anyway, the WP article, and process physics in general, seems to have shamefully taken this maybe-viable model of spacetime and turn it into something that sounds like pseudoscience. Which I admit is something that I have a habit of doing myself ... but that's another topic.
A review of the actual results of the random matrix stuff in the Cahill theory is called for. And the WP article should be trimmed of the wilder-sounding claims. linas 05:40, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
The magic google search phrase is "gebit quantum" linas 05:50, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
The section on other natural carriers in Microwave auditory effect is in need of some attention. It appears to combine real information about decay processes combined with unsupported speculation about neural effects Salsb 17:47, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
Hello, Please notice this project. I hope that the List of publications in physics will be adopted by the physics project. Thanks, APH 06:49, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi, just dropped by to alert you all to what I think is a problem with User:CarlHewitt, who has written some long articles on his own CS "theory", actor model. This article probably violates the "original research" policy, but the immediate problem is that Hewitt claims his theory was "inspired" by gtr and quantum theory, so he added the articles to Category:General relativity and Category:Quantum physics. I regard this link as far too tenuous to warrant being added to these categories, so I left a polite note and removed the categories, but he immediately added them back. I left a second note and removed them again, but the situation probably needs to be monitored.--- CH (talk) 22:28, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi all, thanks for your comments. Looks like the concensus is that Hewitt's work is legit as CS, but everyone here seems to agree that the categorizations he wants to add are clearly inappropriate. Has this kind of "category pollution" vandalism happened before? How was it resolved?
I tried to talk to Hewitt, but he didn't really reply to my objections, just reverted my changes, which I reverted (leaving a succession of polite notes in the talk page), and we are now at the three revert threshold. What next? Has anyone here interacted with him before? Any advice on where I can go from here? --- CH (talk) 03:48, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Another example: Quantum_indeterminacy#Quantum_indeterminacy_in_computation . He thinks it's a quantum phenonmenon, I would say it's only analogous to the quantum case. Maybe this is the source of his confusion. Maybe it can be explained to him satisfactorily. GangofOne 06:38, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I just discovered Category:Physics stubs which has a number of articles that appear to not have been categorized. If anyone feels like killing some time on WP, going through these would be a good idea. linas 04:39, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
I recently ran into a difficulty with categorizing the article on the Bevatron that I'm working on. The current organization seems to be that Category:Particle accelerators describes particle accelerators in generality (designs, concepts, etc.), while its subcategory Category:Particle colliders contains articles on specific machines. This works well for modern accelerators, which all do indeed have colliding beams, but the Bevatron was not a collider--it just ran protons into a fixed target. My idea, therefore, is to create a new subcat of the accelerator category, called something like Category:Historical particle accelerators that would have the Bevatron and other past machines (say, prior to LEP?) that I, for one, am interested in filling in over time. Does that seem a reasonable way to do it, or are there other ideas? -- SCZenz 21:56, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Help is needed on this article; User:William M. Connolley, who does not consider this to be a valid subject, has reverted eight months of editing, removing details and examples. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 09:03, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
The bot User talk:Curpsbot-unicodify has started crawling the math and physics pages and converting html greek characters, such as γ, into glyphs that are hard to work with (although they render the same way). I don't think this is a good idea for math formulas and math expressions, although I support it for the other cases (people/place names, etc.) I'd like to see some sort of majority consensus developed on this, for or against, at User talk:Curpsbot-unicodify. linas 15:00, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Any expert in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics available here? The Coanda effect article, while a legitimate topic and article, has and will have the tendency to attract some crackpots, due to the "flying saucer"/"vortex theory" connection. I've listed it on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics and just removed a weblink to Jean-Louis Naudin's website.
Also I've heard some voices, that the Coanda effect is misrepresented by claiming "it's the effect that make wings work". But a field expert has to be the judge here.
Please have a look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/False Doppler. -- Pjacobi 11:55, 25 September 2005 (UTC)
This page is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
I am not sure what is to be done about the fact that there are so many ways to categorize elementary particles. In particular, a top quark could be listed as a quark, a fermion, and a subatomic particle, as well as under particle physics and Quantum chromodynamics. This is too many. What should be done? One possibility is that we get rid of categories like quark and fermion entirely, and just make sure each particle's relationship to those definitions is well-documented in Template:elementary. Any thoughts? -- SCZenz 00:01, 23 July 2005 (UTC)
Somebody just went through and put a bunch of antiparticles into Category:Antimatter which is dedicated to things related to antimatter in fiction. I think this is sad after all the effort that's been put into paring down the number of categories that the particles are in, but what do other people think? -- SCZenz 06:05, 1 August 2005 (UTC)
I put Category:Quarkonium up for deletion, see Wikipedia:Categories for deletion#Category:Quarkonium, since it is empty and I could only find two articles to place in the category {including Quarkonium } Salsb 15:51, August 29, 2005 (UTC)
I have made the changes discussed below. Template:Elementary now lists the SM particles, the Higgs boson, the graviton, and links to List of particles#Hypothetical particles. That section of the List of particles, which I just reorganized a bit, seems to have all the SUSY particles there were before and more. If there are other particles people want articles on, I think they should be added to the particle list page. -- SCZenz 18:48, 25 July 2005 (UTC)
Well, you misunderstand why I dislike navigating with templates. I think that categories provide a superior navigational structure to templates, (as the above conversation about gluinos already makes clear). But I doubt this argument will bear fruit, so I'll stop vocalizing on this. linas 23:52, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
"Other hypothetical particles" should list axion as well; CAST is the current interesting experiment for this. linas 00:11, 28 July 2005 (UTC)
Template:Composite has three entries -- exotic meson, tetraquarks and hybrids -- all of which redirect to exotic meson. Should these be split into three articles, or should the template list non-quark model mesons, or just exotic meson ? Salsb 00:45, 26 July 2005 (UTC)
A whole bunch of quotes about Tesla's philosophy of rotating magnetic fields were just put on Magnetic field by User:Reddi. I may be sensative about Tesla in particular, since the relativity-denying crowd seems to like him, but I don't think that long quotes on the philosophy of one aspect of the subject are appropriate for the article. Thoughts? -- SCZenz 18:16, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
How about this for a solution: stop making rotating magnetic field be a redirect, and turn it into a full-fledged article? The article magnetic field could then say something like See main article rotating magnetic field for more information. linas 23:44, 27 July 2005 (UTC)
I think this list could use some cleaning, but I'm working on something else right now. Karol 08:42, July 28, 2005 (UTC)
I think this may be crank material, but I don't know enough to tell. Please review. (Also listed at WP:PNA). JesseW 01:49, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Firstly, though I have a strong interest, IANAP and I'm officially crap at math. So, I need the help of someone here (if they would be so kind). I have been reverting additions to criticality accident and others for quite some time which insist on attributing the infamous "blue flash" associated with these accidents to cherenkov radiation. This is a common mistake even on purportedly reputable internet sites concerning the issue. I think it is quite clear that the blue glow seen in air during these events does not occur because of the Cherenkov effect but instead to direct ionization and fluorescence of the air. The only resonable source of Cherenkov light from a fission event is beta particles in air (yes? I mean alphas and positrons are stopped SOOO easliy and heavy ions have NO chance of reaching relativistic velocities.....right?) and because air is so tenuous the velocity of the betas would have to be very close to the speed of light (>99.97% c) in order for Cherenkov light to occur. Here's my problem then: I do not know how to convert eV to velocity for electrons (or any particle for that matter! :) so that I can say with certainty that "only beta particles exceeding X MeV are capable of producing Cherenkov light in air and therefore since there are few (none?) beta emitting isotopes which produce betas w/ energies greater than X MeV, this is a highly unlikely cause for blue light seen in the air during a criticality event". Can someone help me? I would very much appreicate it!! Thanks. :) -- Deglr6328 09:11, 13 August 2005 (UTC)
I've put Bogdanov Affair on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics. The article got a heavy amount of editing since the Bogdanovs themselves (if this claim is correct) tried to put it "right". Currently the article is protected. Confusingly Lubos Motl recently spoke in favour of the Bogdanovs [1] whereas Peter Woit unsurprisingly isn't amused [2]. -- Pjacobi 17:20, August 14, 2005 (UTC)
A new user, Markdroberts, is contributing stuff to physics articles. Unfortunately, there is quite a lot of cleanup to do after him, as this user has no idea of how to use wiki markup properly.
I cleaned up Finsler manifold, Lanczos tensor, Perfect fluid. and Higgs mechanism, then got tired of it. Several more are left: Rotation curve, Isolated physical system, Asymptotically flat spacetime. The articles Geodesic deviation equation and Signature change seems to have already been cleaned up by other people.
Also, physicists, could you take a look at the correctness of these articles? I found Finsler manifold to miss words from a sentence, and I can't understand what it wants to say. Thanks! Oleg Alexandrov 17:50, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
Could someone have a look at Aether Physics Model and its subpage APM Physical Dimensions. To me it seems quackery, but it would be useful if a specialist could check to see if it should be brought to VfD. - SimonP 20:24, August 15, 2005 (UTC)
This category was getting messy, as was the subcat on magnetism, so I reorganized them. The subcat on electricity needs to be done as well, its still up for delection, so I haven't touched it yet. I'd appreciate comments if anyone wants to check it out. thanks Salsb 14:22, August 16, 2005 (UTC)
Electromagnetic induction is being continually reverted by User:Sidam to unreadable, misformatted original-research psuedoscientific nonsense. He is now restoring the text without using his user name, presumably to avoid the three revert rule, so we may need more assistance in keeping the page in the correct form. It appears that he has also tried to put similar text on other pages before, and eventually was thwarted. -- SCZenz 17:46, 18 August 2005 (UTC)
After a brief hiatus, it seems Sidam is back at it again. Ugh. -- SCZenz 18:44, 25 August 2005 (UTC)
If you're wondering why I've been changing silly cosmetic things on list of particles, I've been trying to pretty it up a bit in response to suggestions after User:Merovingian nominated it as a featured list. Go to Talk:List of particles to see where to go to support it. -- SCZenz 22:24, 1 September 2005 (UTC)
I just stumbled into this in the physics category. Maybe someone would like to spiff it up? I'm on vacation :P Karol 07:40, September 3, 2005 (UTC)
May please somebody have a look at dynamical friction? And Talk:Dynamical friction? IMHO it concentrates on an effect which is disputed at best (dynamical friction causing the red shift) and misses details from areas where dynamical friction really is important (galaxy evolution). -- Pjacobi 10:49, September 4, 2005 (UTC)
Exactly - the first part is not bad but the stuff on redshifts is nonsense. The loss of energy by the photon would be very small, and if the effect mattered at all the images of distant objects would be horribly blurred. Also the time dilatation has been confirmed for the envelope of the photons - i.e. distant supernovae are not only redshifted, but the light curve is stretched in time.
One should indeed add material on the effects of dynamical friction on the evolution of galaxies, star clusters, and the pre-planetary disk. Dynamical friction has been invoked by the people behind the "giant impact" moon theory, to return the earth-moon system to a low eccentricity orbit - the giant whack would make for an eccentric one. Sorry, due to a health problem in the family I may not have time. Pdn 06:56, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
You may want to comment at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Modified Newtonian dynamics/archive1. -- Jitse Niesen ( talk) 18:41, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
I probably should have just #REDIRECTED this article to Heisenberg picture, but instead, I listed it on VfD. Not sure why I bothered. I guess my brain is muddled after trying to clean up Category:Quantum mechanics (again). linas 22:02, 5 September 2005 (UTC)
It seems there is a basic problem with categories in physics and chemistry. I don't see directly how to solve this but I am awaiting your comments. The problem is that in physics, usually, the name of a field covers its theoretical as well as experimental aspects like for example atomic physics, nuclear physics, molecular physics and so on. But there are exceptions like quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry or quantum field theory which are purely theoretical fields. When one tries to categorize this one can obtain that atomic physics or nuclear physics are subfields of quantum mechanics or maybe of quantum chemistry (for atomic physics) because theoretical atomic physics and nuclear physics are fields of quantum mechanics. This is particulary true for scattering. Scattering theory is a clear subfield of quantum mechanics but this is not the case for the phenomenology of scattering which can be seen as a subfield of atomic, molecular, nuclear or particle physics. If you still follow you understand that having an unclear editorial line with respect to this leads to the claim that Scattering can be a subcategory of atomic physics and a subsubcategory of quantum mechnaics while at the same time it is a subcategory of quantum mechanics. This of course leads to nonsense. A possible answer to this paradox could be to split atomic physics into theoretical and experimental atomic/molecular physics. Theoretical atomic/molecular physics would be a subcategory of quantum chemistry and quantum chemistry a subcategory of quantum mechanics which would be in turn a subfield of theoretical physics. Maybe the best way to proceed would be to put somewhere -- why not here? -- a tree of categories for physics and chemistry which would make the editorial line clear -- which ever we decide.-- 131.220.68.177 07:52, 7 September 2005 (UTC)
The thing to keep in mind is that Wikiproject Categories is not infalliable, and their ideas are not policy. I'm going to take back my previous willingness to reorganize physics article along their guidlines. Linas, I approve very much of your comments on User_talk:SeventyThree and on Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject Categories. Their ideas may simply not be relevant to physics, and we police our own categorization rather well. Is there more work to be done fixing SeventyThree's edits that I can help with? -- SCZenz 01:11, 9 September 2005 (UTC)
I thought it would be a good idea to have the possibility of telling other participants what pages we think need attention at the moment, so I've made the physicists' watchlist. Tell me what you think, does it seems helpfull? I've added Antimatter now, since it seemd a little science-fiction-like; maybe also Antiparticle, but I haven't read it, because I'm on vacation and don't have time. Karol 17:20, September 7, 2005 (UTC)
Process physics seems to be in need of a NPOV check and additional cleanup. Fredrik | talk 12:36, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
Gack. Were it not for the university reference, I'd call this pure, unadulterated pseudophysics. Hell, even with the university reference, its still unadulterated pseudoscience. My patented smell-o-meter finds the following problems:
-- linas 18:17, 11 September 2005 (UTC)
This article started ringing a bell ... so I googled. I have a partial explanation for the mixture of legit/pseudo physics seen here. Circa 2000, Reg Cahill and Chris Klinger iterated a random matrix of some kind, with some extra non-linear terms, and found some kind of phase transition ... It was noted that the the result looked like a lattice with random connectivity, and that the nearest-neighbor connectivity was three-dimensional. The claim was made that this was a model of 3D space (explaining why space is 3D), and that "mass" appeared somehow naturally, and also that there were quantum-like effects of some kind ... It actually sounded pretty interesting, and sounded like more-or-less legit math, although it was clear that it would take a lot more work to turn this into a full-fledged physical theory. After some googling, I've discovered that these are the same people I'd heard about.
(FWIW, random matices are fairly hot in physics, being applied to both models of the nucleus, and to various quantum gravity models, including loop quantum gravity. And lets not forget the statistical distribution of the zeros of the Riemann zeta are modelled by a random matrix as well).
I found one reference (below) to the actual hard math behind this thing (although it looks weak). Also, it was clear from the original description that the 3D connectivity was "novel and interesting" but that clearly, a lot had to be done to turn this into something that was compatible with quantum mechanics and/or turn it into something that explained mass/intertia & was consistent with special relativity. I can't find refs to how this was done.
Anyway, the WP article, and process physics in general, seems to have shamefully taken this maybe-viable model of spacetime and turn it into something that sounds like pseudoscience. Which I admit is something that I have a habit of doing myself ... but that's another topic.
A review of the actual results of the random matrix stuff in the Cahill theory is called for. And the WP article should be trimmed of the wilder-sounding claims. linas 05:40, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
The magic google search phrase is "gebit quantum" linas 05:50, 12 September 2005 (UTC)
The section on other natural carriers in Microwave auditory effect is in need of some attention. It appears to combine real information about decay processes combined with unsupported speculation about neural effects Salsb 17:47, September 11, 2005 (UTC)
Hello, Please notice this project. I hope that the List of publications in physics will be adopted by the physics project. Thanks, APH 06:49, 13 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi, just dropped by to alert you all to what I think is a problem with User:CarlHewitt, who has written some long articles on his own CS "theory", actor model. This article probably violates the "original research" policy, but the immediate problem is that Hewitt claims his theory was "inspired" by gtr and quantum theory, so he added the articles to Category:General relativity and Category:Quantum physics. I regard this link as far too tenuous to warrant being added to these categories, so I left a polite note and removed the categories, but he immediately added them back. I left a second note and removed them again, but the situation probably needs to be monitored.--- CH (talk) 22:28, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
Hi all, thanks for your comments. Looks like the concensus is that Hewitt's work is legit as CS, but everyone here seems to agree that the categorizations he wants to add are clearly inappropriate. Has this kind of "category pollution" vandalism happened before? How was it resolved?
I tried to talk to Hewitt, but he didn't really reply to my objections, just reverted my changes, which I reverted (leaving a succession of polite notes in the talk page), and we are now at the three revert threshold. What next? Has anyone here interacted with him before? Any advice on where I can go from here? --- CH (talk) 03:48, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
Another example: Quantum_indeterminacy#Quantum_indeterminacy_in_computation . He thinks it's a quantum phenonmenon, I would say it's only analogous to the quantum case. Maybe this is the source of his confusion. Maybe it can be explained to him satisfactorily. GangofOne 06:38, 15 September 2005 (UTC)
I just discovered Category:Physics stubs which has a number of articles that appear to not have been categorized. If anyone feels like killing some time on WP, going through these would be a good idea. linas 04:39, 16 September 2005 (UTC)
I recently ran into a difficulty with categorizing the article on the Bevatron that I'm working on. The current organization seems to be that Category:Particle accelerators describes particle accelerators in generality (designs, concepts, etc.), while its subcategory Category:Particle colliders contains articles on specific machines. This works well for modern accelerators, which all do indeed have colliding beams, but the Bevatron was not a collider--it just ran protons into a fixed target. My idea, therefore, is to create a new subcat of the accelerator category, called something like Category:Historical particle accelerators that would have the Bevatron and other past machines (say, prior to LEP?) that I, for one, am interested in filling in over time. Does that seem a reasonable way to do it, or are there other ideas? -- SCZenz 21:56, 20 September 2005 (UTC)
Help is needed on this article; User:William M. Connolley, who does not consider this to be a valid subject, has reverted eight months of editing, removing details and examples. ‣ᓛᖁ ᑐ 09:03, 21 September 2005 (UTC)
The bot User talk:Curpsbot-unicodify has started crawling the math and physics pages and converting html greek characters, such as γ, into glyphs that are hard to work with (although they render the same way). I don't think this is a good idea for math formulas and math expressions, although I support it for the other cases (people/place names, etc.) I'd like to see some sort of majority consensus developed on this, for or against, at User talk:Curpsbot-unicodify. linas 15:00, 24 September 2005 (UTC)
Any expert in hydrodynamics and aerodynamics available here? The Coanda effect article, while a legitimate topic and article, has and will have the tendency to attract some crackpots, due to the "flying saucer"/"vortex theory" connection. I've listed it on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics and just removed a weblink to Jean-Louis Naudin's website.
Also I've heard some voices, that the Coanda effect is misrepresented by claiming "it's the effect that make wings work". But a field expert has to be the judge here.
Please have a look at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/False Doppler. -- Pjacobi 11:55, 25 September 2005 (UTC)