![]() | 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. |
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)
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)
(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)
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)
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)
Nobel prize-winning Wikipedian. See also Brian David Josephson ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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. -- Lambiam Talk 16:20, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
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)
This areticle is up at AfD. ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! - review me 07:15, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Two (thankfully) unrelated items that may bear watching:
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 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)
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)
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 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)
I've nominated the article Leo baranski for deletion; see Articles for deletion/Leo baranski. -- Lambiam Talk 12:46, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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)
It seems to me that there is a contradiction within this article. The article confidently states that:
Yet a few paragraphs away we find it stated that:
Should, then, we revise the statement to say something like:
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)
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
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)
![]() | 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. |
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)
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)
(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)
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)
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)
Nobel prize-winning Wikipedian. See also Brian David Josephson ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views).
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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. -- Lambiam Talk 16:20, 8 May 2006 (UTC)
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)
This areticle is up at AfD. ßlηguγΣη | Have your say!!! - review me 07:15, 9 May 2006 (UTC)
Two (thankfully) unrelated items that may bear watching:
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 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)
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)
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 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)
I've nominated the article Leo baranski for deletion; see Articles for deletion/Leo baranski. -- Lambiam Talk 12:46, 15 May 2006 (UTC)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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)
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.
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)
It seems to me that there is a contradiction within this article. The article confidently states that:
Yet a few paragraphs away we find it stated that:
Should, then, we revise the statement to say something like:
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)
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
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)