![]() | 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'd like help with a bunch of articles on the biomechanics of animal locomotion: Lead change, Lead (leg), Horse gait, Locomotion... See Talk:Horse gait#Group gaits. Thanks. -- Una Smith ( talk) 16:29, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
LaTeX to WikiText Conversion Count Iblis ( talk) 21:27, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
I could use some more eyeballs on this page.
In my view, to help people get to the article they want most quickly, it is helpful to include structure in the page to group together meanings primarily related to Entropy in a thermodynamic sense, and those primarily related to Entropy in an Information Theory sense. However, because there is no provision for this is the WP:DAB guidelines, various editors specialising in disambiguation (who may know rather more about disambiguation than they do about entropy), would prefer to see all the links muddled together in a single (IMO much harder to navigate) long alphabetical list. Cf this diff: [1].
Since dab pages are supposed to help readers who do know something about the subject find the article they want, I'd greatly appreciate if members of this project could look at the two versions above, and then leave their thoughts on the talk page.
Thanks, Jheald ( talk) 23:23, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
I have been trying to figure out ways to improve the Black holearticle, which has grown to an immense length. In the process I have been looking at related articles and found that they are all over place, having considerable overlap. For example, there are separate articles covering schwarzschild metric and schwarzschild coordinates. These articles (as well as the Black hole article itself) could do with some reorganization (merging, splitting, redirecting where necessary). For convenience, I have made a list of all article I could find on my user page.
Do others feel that this is something worthwhile? And if so are there people willing to help out?
( TimothyRias ( talk) 12:58, 2 April 2008 (UTC))
needs article 58.163.129.146 ( talk) 07:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
You mean Van de Graaff generator? ( TimothyRias ( talk) 13:14, 5 April 2008 (UTC))
Hi, I'm not sure why Fourth dimension was tagged by WikiProject Physics, but I don't think it's relevant to physics. It discusses 4D Euclidean space, a mathematical construct, whereas physics (general relativity) deals with 4D Minkowskian space, which is not an Euclidean space. I recommend that this article be moved under another project (probably Mathematics). Thanks!— Tetracube ( talk) 13:58, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
This template is making good progress, the discussion has been moved to Template talk:ScientificValue. Here's some examples of it's use:
--
SkyLined
(
talk)
10:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
[note: moved from above into dedicated section Steve ( talk) 17:33, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Warren Siegel has some good advice for us. It is not a good idea to follow a historical approach to physics. In this case, I would suggest to rewrite all the electromagnetism articles on wikipedia. You just start with Coulomb's law and demand covariance under Lorentz transformation. That then implies the existence of the magnetic field, it yields Maxwell's equations and the equation for the Lorentz force.
This is how Nature works. How all these laws/equations were discovered is a matter of history. The historical approach is necessarily extremely confusing because at the time the laws were discovered we only had a partial understanding of the full theory. Count Iblis ( talk) 13:45, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
But then should we not start with the Standard Model, and show how classical electromagnetism emerges from that framework? No, we have to choose a more grounded place to start, a place to motivate any more abstract discussion.
Also, be careful! Siegal makes some good points, but Wikipedia isn't a science text-book, it's an encyclopedia. We're not trying to teach, but rather explain all aspects of a subject, including the historical and everyday.
For what it's worth, I've fought this battle before.-- Starwed ( talk) 09:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Reply to everyone: Here on wikipedia we don't have to follow precisely the way things are explained in textbooks. If we were to do that then things that are normally first explained at university could never be explained to lay people. Making things accessible to lay people is one thing, the historical approach is something else :) . Count Iblis ( talk) 13:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I was thinking about the anime Noein, and it occurred to me that it might be implicitly based on the philosophical idea (akin to solipsism) that there is only one observer (in this case, Haruka Kaminogi) whose consciousness causes collapse of the quantum state (wave function) of the universe. This is kind of like the idea of the Hindu god Brahma who makes the world come into existence by looking at it. Do any of you know what this doctrine is called? Do we have an article on it? JRSpriggs ( talk) 06:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Can anybody please add a simple lay-comprehensible explanation to
Thermoelectric cooling on just how it works?
The workings of conventional electric heating -- "pump electricity in, get heat" -- seem obvious enough, but "pump electricity in, get cooling" is puzzlingly counter-intuitive -- the thing is making some sort of tricky end run around the usual workings of the
laws of thermodynamics. Where does the energy of the heat in the material being cooled go, and why?
Thanks for assistance. --
201.37.229.117 (
talk)
02:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Hello physics people. I have been working to reconstruct the article about Emmy Noether on my drawing board. I have completed her biography and have now come to the part where I must explain (briefly, but in some detail) her contributions to mathematics and theoretical physics.
However, I – as an English teacher who failed astronomy in college because there were too many evil numbers – can't understand very much of the science behind
Noether's theorem. I'm hoping one of you is willing (or can recommend someone) to help me write this final section about Ms. Noether's work in the areas of symmetry and conservation laws. If so, please leave a note here (I'll watch the page) or – preferably – on my
talk page. I thank you in advance and will now recede to my lair of
Balzac and
Achebe. –
Scartol •
Tok
00:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Introduction to M-theory was completely rewritten in 2004 by an editor who included large swaths of text copied verbatim from the book Turn of the Century. The article was brought up for concerns about no references being cited in such a large article and the general format of 'introduction to...' articles when the copying was noticed (see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#X for Dummies fork). Due to the volume of the material copied, and subsequent wording changes being derivatives of the copyrighted text, all revisions of the article since January 2004 were deleted. Since this was a lengthy article, I would appreciate it if members of this wikiproject could get it back up to speed. Four years is a long time to miss things in most theoretical science fields :) - M ask? 09:00, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi everybody,
I just posted a "request for comment" in reference to an ongoing revert-war at Faraday's law of induction. Despite having better things to do with my time, I'm now having four simultaneous disputes with User:George Smyth XI -- at Talk:Maxwell's equations, Talk:Faraday's law of induction, Talk:Lorentz force, and Talk:Biot-Savart law.
Here are some of George's priceless quotes from the past week or two:
Has anyone had success dealing with situations/people like this? I'm at my wit's end. :-) -- Steve ( talk) 06:37, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Linas, I was misrepresented by Steve on the issue of "div B = 0 follows from curl A = B, but not vica-versa". I merely pointed out that curl A = B is a less ambiguous equation because div B = 0 might also be interpreted as referring to an inverse square law.
We know of course that in the case of the inverse square law solution that the divergence will not be zero at the origin and so in the case of the magnetic B field, it is important that we emphasize that the divergence is zero everywhere.
In the case of curl A = B, the equation is unambiguous. My ultimate point was that the equation div B = 0 is really referring to curl A = B and as such, the term 'Gauss's law for magnetism', while techniccally correct, is not the best name to use in the circumstance. George Smyth XI ( talk) 00:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I should know better than to get in the middle of this, but I was wondering how Jackson defines Faraday's Law. In the above argument and the talk pages that I visited there were some quotes from Griffiths which said one thing and also claims that Griffiths is wrong. So what do other books, like Jackson, say? I'd check myself but my copy is in my office. Joshua Davis ( talk) 05:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
For what it's worth, Feynman's Lectures on physics uses essentially the same terminology as Griffiths. The flux one is called the "Flux rule", and the partial-derivative-and-curl one is called "Faraday's law". He's quite clear in differentiating the two. See page II-17-3 and thereabouts. -- Steve ( talk) 16:46, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi everybody! There's been little progress on this front in the past few days, except that George's series of priceless quotes continues to grow:
The conversation threads are all probably way too long, at this point, for anyone else to want to read. I sure wouldn't. :-) Oh well, no one ever promised me that Wikipedia would be a flawless system. To George's credit, most of the disputes have been restricted to the talk pages, apart from at Faraday's law of induction where it's also associated with a revert-war over the introductory section (subject of the still-pending "Request for Comment"). Hope all is well, -- Steve ( talk) 18:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Brews, Regarding the Faraday paradox, Feynman completely overlooked the fact that if he had used a total time derivative version of the Maxwell-Faraday law, then the vXB effect would have been catered for by the convective (v.grad)B term. Take the curl of vXB and you get (v.grad)B.
The maths is very basic. Total time derivative = Partial Time derivative + Convective derivative.
Feynman seems to have missed this basic fact. On the Physics forum web link which I supplied above, somebody called "Obsessive Maths Freak" points this very basic point out, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to him. They are all running around confused like headless chickens because of Feynman. It seems that if Feynman is confused, then everybody has to be confused and nobody wants to listen to the solution. George Smyth XI ( talk) 02:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Please vote at Talk:Eb/N0#Survey on which unit that should be used at Wikipedia for measuring Spectral efficiency. For a background discussion, see Talk:Spectral_efficiency#Bit/s/Hz and Talk:Eb/N0#Bit/s/Hz. Mange01 ( talk) 07:21, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
I have this great insight: A subject as large as physics cannot have only one "Table Of Contents". It needs multiple TOCs, each organized in different ways. kinda like Yahoo shopping results sorted by different criteria. The sorts for physics: --by history --by "subject" [problem: what's a "subject"??] --by "Foundation".
Details on "Foundations" order: Crucial experiments/observations together with their related theory, in order by date of theory publication. An ultra primitive startup list:
PRIMARY OBSERVATIONS/EXPERIMENTS - [THEORY] --Observations of The Almagest; Copernicus; Galileo; Kepler et al-[Newtonian Mechanics] --Experiments of Faraday & others-[Maxwell's Equations] --Experiments of Planck, Debye, et al-[Quantum Mechanics] --Michelson-Morley experiment-[Special Relativity] --Precession of Mercury [General Relativity} --DeBroglie waves &??-[Shrodinger equation] --Electron/electron scattering [QFT & Dirac] --Face of Alfred E.Neuman-[String theory]
Ultra primitive list above needs a lot of work. Just a start.
Further thoughts: One index - by history - should include all people, great and small[er], experimentalists and theorists. The "Foundations Index" should only cover the most prominent observations, tied to most significant theories, like precession of Mercury and general relativity. I just realized I omitted thermodynamics cause I know no thermodynamics. I can see how debating what is most "Foundational" would lead to endless debate and strain Wikipedia. But it does seem like a great idea to try to create some kind of better ordered, briefer summary of physics. It is such a pivotal science but like David Letterman said "Its just so BIG". HarryWertM ( talk) 16:38, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Shallow water equations includes a striking picture that has "featured" status, but the article has a "no references" tag. Does someone know what the most suitable references are? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Here's an image found in group velocity. It's not visually stunning like some "Featured" images, but its purpose is to make a concept clear rather than to hit you between the eyes before you've read anything. This seems like a perfect example of a well-explained picture being worth a very large number of words. Should this one have "Featured" status? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Does somebody know of a list (as complete as possible) of physics journals, including their ISSN? I'm currently working on extending a reference database, currently used in the Math WP, to physics, as well. I'd like to incorporate the journals into this database, as well. Thanks, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 09:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
according to Utrecht University ( TimothyRias ( talk) 11:39, 17 April 2008 (UTC))
There is now a database containing the references of all WP physics articles (as of April 08). This tool has been used by the Wikiproject Math community since about half a year and, according to the feedback I get, is a valuable tool for simple and quick referencing.
In total, there are 10500 references. You can access the database at http://zeteo.info. The references are linked to their corresponding authors, publishers, and journals respectively. An author/publisher/journal is a separate database entity, thus providing the correct structure to uniformly host additional information like wikilink of an author, issn of a journal etc.
More or less manually I fed the data into the database. It was quite a bit of work to do this. I haven't attempted to verify the information which is now in the database. An in-depth check of a small sample of templates showed, that the stuff is generally pretty well-done, though.
Several options are available; for example it is easy to let it put out something like
for those who prefer footnote-style referencing. For your commodity, there is a little search engine template similar to the google toolbar etc., which can be integrated in the browser's menu. So, no excuses anymore :-) for not referencing an article when you actually know a reference off your head.
Anybody can add/update database items. It is possible to import bibtex files and also wikipedia source code (containing reference templates such as {{ cite}} and {{ citation}}) and let the database parse them, so you can relatively comfortably add the items of your personal bibtex file. A brief documentation can be found here, bugs and questions etc. can be reported at my talk page. Also, if you have ideas how to improve the database, let me know. I'm myself not into physics, so I don't know your guys' needs.
Enjoy! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:24, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
An IP user who has posted as 200.97.93.67 and 189.48.105.246, among others, has been adding stuff about his personal theory to talk pages, including an advertisement for his book, along with stuff on the main pages referencing the talk pages (these have been reverted).
He does this presumably since he knows his essays won't be accepted in the articles. I have deleted all his edits except those that have been replied to, which are on Talk:Wave-particle duality and Talk:Bohr model. Other pages he has edited can be seen in the histories posted above. The way, the truth, and the light ( talk) 07:04, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I have been updating the list of baryons extensively in the last few days. However, I am not a particle physicist and it would be peachy if one (or twenty hundreds) could visit the List of baryons page and the Talk:List of baryons page to give some feedback and check if explanations given for different stuff makes sense. If you aren't a particle physicist, that's cool too. You could give general feedback about the page and if things were presented clearly. Headbomb ( talk) 20:08, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Over the past few days there's been a poster using IPs 87.194.39.42 and 84.56.74.246, reverting the redirects at singlet state and triplet state to point at the quantum-mechanical meanings instead of diradical. I didn't want to respond to him directly as he's used vulgar insults, but he does have a point. Therefore, I created the new article spin multiplicity to unify the physics and chemistry links here. I propose that singlet and spin triplet be moved over those redirects, for consistency - I just moved doublet (physics) (yet a third naming convention!) to doublet state, the only one I could do myself. The way, the truth, and the light ( talk) 08:11, 25 April 2008 (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'd like help with a bunch of articles on the biomechanics of animal locomotion: Lead change, Lead (leg), Horse gait, Locomotion... See Talk:Horse gait#Group gaits. Thanks. -- Una Smith ( talk) 16:29, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
LaTeX to WikiText Conversion Count Iblis ( talk) 21:27, 1 April 2008 (UTC)
I could use some more eyeballs on this page.
In my view, to help people get to the article they want most quickly, it is helpful to include structure in the page to group together meanings primarily related to Entropy in a thermodynamic sense, and those primarily related to Entropy in an Information Theory sense. However, because there is no provision for this is the WP:DAB guidelines, various editors specialising in disambiguation (who may know rather more about disambiguation than they do about entropy), would prefer to see all the links muddled together in a single (IMO much harder to navigate) long alphabetical list. Cf this diff: [1].
Since dab pages are supposed to help readers who do know something about the subject find the article they want, I'd greatly appreciate if members of this project could look at the two versions above, and then leave their thoughts on the talk page.
Thanks, Jheald ( talk) 23:23, 23 March 2008 (UTC)
I have been trying to figure out ways to improve the Black holearticle, which has grown to an immense length. In the process I have been looking at related articles and found that they are all over place, having considerable overlap. For example, there are separate articles covering schwarzschild metric and schwarzschild coordinates. These articles (as well as the Black hole article itself) could do with some reorganization (merging, splitting, redirecting where necessary). For convenience, I have made a list of all article I could find on my user page.
Do others feel that this is something worthwhile? And if so are there people willing to help out?
( TimothyRias ( talk) 12:58, 2 April 2008 (UTC))
needs article 58.163.129.146 ( talk) 07:52, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
You mean Van de Graaff generator? ( TimothyRias ( talk) 13:14, 5 April 2008 (UTC))
Hi, I'm not sure why Fourth dimension was tagged by WikiProject Physics, but I don't think it's relevant to physics. It discusses 4D Euclidean space, a mathematical construct, whereas physics (general relativity) deals with 4D Minkowskian space, which is not an Euclidean space. I recommend that this article be moved under another project (probably Mathematics). Thanks!— Tetracube ( talk) 13:58, 5 April 2008 (UTC)
This template is making good progress, the discussion has been moved to Template talk:ScientificValue. Here's some examples of it's use:
--
SkyLined
(
talk)
10:22, 9 April 2008 (UTC)
[note: moved from above into dedicated section Steve ( talk) 17:33, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Warren Siegel has some good advice for us. It is not a good idea to follow a historical approach to physics. In this case, I would suggest to rewrite all the electromagnetism articles on wikipedia. You just start with Coulomb's law and demand covariance under Lorentz transformation. That then implies the existence of the magnetic field, it yields Maxwell's equations and the equation for the Lorentz force.
This is how Nature works. How all these laws/equations were discovered is a matter of history. The historical approach is necessarily extremely confusing because at the time the laws were discovered we only had a partial understanding of the full theory. Count Iblis ( talk) 13:45, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
But then should we not start with the Standard Model, and show how classical electromagnetism emerges from that framework? No, we have to choose a more grounded place to start, a place to motivate any more abstract discussion.
Also, be careful! Siegal makes some good points, but Wikipedia isn't a science text-book, it's an encyclopedia. We're not trying to teach, but rather explain all aspects of a subject, including the historical and everyday.
For what it's worth, I've fought this battle before.-- Starwed ( talk) 09:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Reply to everyone: Here on wikipedia we don't have to follow precisely the way things are explained in textbooks. If we were to do that then things that are normally first explained at university could never be explained to lay people. Making things accessible to lay people is one thing, the historical approach is something else :) . Count Iblis ( talk) 13:54, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I was thinking about the anime Noein, and it occurred to me that it might be implicitly based on the philosophical idea (akin to solipsism) that there is only one observer (in this case, Haruka Kaminogi) whose consciousness causes collapse of the quantum state (wave function) of the universe. This is kind of like the idea of the Hindu god Brahma who makes the world come into existence by looking at it. Do any of you know what this doctrine is called? Do we have an article on it? JRSpriggs ( talk) 06:51, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Can anybody please add a simple lay-comprehensible explanation to
Thermoelectric cooling on just how it works?
The workings of conventional electric heating -- "pump electricity in, get heat" -- seem obvious enough, but "pump electricity in, get cooling" is puzzlingly counter-intuitive -- the thing is making some sort of tricky end run around the usual workings of the
laws of thermodynamics. Where does the energy of the heat in the material being cooled go, and why?
Thanks for assistance. --
201.37.229.117 (
talk)
02:07, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Hello physics people. I have been working to reconstruct the article about Emmy Noether on my drawing board. I have completed her biography and have now come to the part where I must explain (briefly, but in some detail) her contributions to mathematics and theoretical physics.
However, I – as an English teacher who failed astronomy in college because there were too many evil numbers – can't understand very much of the science behind
Noether's theorem. I'm hoping one of you is willing (or can recommend someone) to help me write this final section about Ms. Noether's work in the areas of symmetry and conservation laws. If so, please leave a note here (I'll watch the page) or – preferably – on my
talk page. I thank you in advance and will now recede to my lair of
Balzac and
Achebe. –
Scartol •
Tok
00:20, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Introduction to M-theory was completely rewritten in 2004 by an editor who included large swaths of text copied verbatim from the book Turn of the Century. The article was brought up for concerns about no references being cited in such a large article and the general format of 'introduction to...' articles when the copying was noticed (see Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents#X for Dummies fork). Due to the volume of the material copied, and subsequent wording changes being derivatives of the copyrighted text, all revisions of the article since January 2004 were deleted. Since this was a lengthy article, I would appreciate it if members of this wikiproject could get it back up to speed. Four years is a long time to miss things in most theoretical science fields :) - M ask? 09:00, 14 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi everybody,
I just posted a "request for comment" in reference to an ongoing revert-war at Faraday's law of induction. Despite having better things to do with my time, I'm now having four simultaneous disputes with User:George Smyth XI -- at Talk:Maxwell's equations, Talk:Faraday's law of induction, Talk:Lorentz force, and Talk:Biot-Savart law.
Here are some of George's priceless quotes from the past week or two:
Has anyone had success dealing with situations/people like this? I'm at my wit's end. :-) -- Steve ( talk) 06:37, 11 April 2008 (UTC)
Linas, I was misrepresented by Steve on the issue of "div B = 0 follows from curl A = B, but not vica-versa". I merely pointed out that curl A = B is a less ambiguous equation because div B = 0 might also be interpreted as referring to an inverse square law.
We know of course that in the case of the inverse square law solution that the divergence will not be zero at the origin and so in the case of the magnetic B field, it is important that we emphasize that the divergence is zero everywhere.
In the case of curl A = B, the equation is unambiguous. My ultimate point was that the equation div B = 0 is really referring to curl A = B and as such, the term 'Gauss's law for magnetism', while techniccally correct, is not the best name to use in the circumstance. George Smyth XI ( talk) 00:10, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
I should know better than to get in the middle of this, but I was wondering how Jackson defines Faraday's Law. In the above argument and the talk pages that I visited there were some quotes from Griffiths which said one thing and also claims that Griffiths is wrong. So what do other books, like Jackson, say? I'd check myself but my copy is in my office. Joshua Davis ( talk) 05:48, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
For what it's worth, Feynman's Lectures on physics uses essentially the same terminology as Griffiths. The flux one is called the "Flux rule", and the partial-derivative-and-curl one is called "Faraday's law". He's quite clear in differentiating the two. See page II-17-3 and thereabouts. -- Steve ( talk) 16:46, 12 April 2008 (UTC)
Hi everybody! There's been little progress on this front in the past few days, except that George's series of priceless quotes continues to grow:
The conversation threads are all probably way too long, at this point, for anyone else to want to read. I sure wouldn't. :-) Oh well, no one ever promised me that Wikipedia would be a flawless system. To George's credit, most of the disputes have been restricted to the talk pages, apart from at Faraday's law of induction where it's also associated with a revert-war over the introductory section (subject of the still-pending "Request for Comment"). Hope all is well, -- Steve ( talk) 18:39, 15 April 2008 (UTC)
Brews, Regarding the Faraday paradox, Feynman completely overlooked the fact that if he had used a total time derivative version of the Maxwell-Faraday law, then the vXB effect would have been catered for by the convective (v.grad)B term. Take the curl of vXB and you get (v.grad)B.
The maths is very basic. Total time derivative = Partial Time derivative + Convective derivative.
Feynman seems to have missed this basic fact. On the Physics forum web link which I supplied above, somebody called "Obsessive Maths Freak" points this very basic point out, but nobody seems to be paying any attention to him. They are all running around confused like headless chickens because of Feynman. It seems that if Feynman is confused, then everybody has to be confused and nobody wants to listen to the solution. George Smyth XI ( talk) 02:05, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
Please vote at Talk:Eb/N0#Survey on which unit that should be used at Wikipedia for measuring Spectral efficiency. For a background discussion, see Talk:Spectral_efficiency#Bit/s/Hz and Talk:Eb/N0#Bit/s/Hz. Mange01 ( talk) 07:21, 16 April 2008 (UTC)
I have this great insight: A subject as large as physics cannot have only one "Table Of Contents". It needs multiple TOCs, each organized in different ways. kinda like Yahoo shopping results sorted by different criteria. The sorts for physics: --by history --by "subject" [problem: what's a "subject"??] --by "Foundation".
Details on "Foundations" order: Crucial experiments/observations together with their related theory, in order by date of theory publication. An ultra primitive startup list:
PRIMARY OBSERVATIONS/EXPERIMENTS - [THEORY] --Observations of The Almagest; Copernicus; Galileo; Kepler et al-[Newtonian Mechanics] --Experiments of Faraday & others-[Maxwell's Equations] --Experiments of Planck, Debye, et al-[Quantum Mechanics] --Michelson-Morley experiment-[Special Relativity] --Precession of Mercury [General Relativity} --DeBroglie waves &??-[Shrodinger equation] --Electron/electron scattering [QFT & Dirac] --Face of Alfred E.Neuman-[String theory]
Ultra primitive list above needs a lot of work. Just a start.
Further thoughts: One index - by history - should include all people, great and small[er], experimentalists and theorists. The "Foundations Index" should only cover the most prominent observations, tied to most significant theories, like precession of Mercury and general relativity. I just realized I omitted thermodynamics cause I know no thermodynamics. I can see how debating what is most "Foundational" would lead to endless debate and strain Wikipedia. But it does seem like a great idea to try to create some kind of better ordered, briefer summary of physics. It is such a pivotal science but like David Letterman said "Its just so BIG". HarryWertM ( talk) 16:38, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
Shallow water equations includes a striking picture that has "featured" status, but the article has a "no references" tag. Does someone know what the most suitable references are? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Here's an image found in group velocity. It's not visually stunning like some "Featured" images, but its purpose is to make a concept clear rather than to hit you between the eyes before you've read anything. This seems like a perfect example of a well-explained picture being worth a very large number of words. Should this one have "Featured" status? Michael Hardy ( talk) 20:53, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
Does somebody know of a list (as complete as possible) of physics journals, including their ISSN? I'm currently working on extending a reference database, currently used in the Math WP, to physics, as well. I'd like to incorporate the journals into this database, as well. Thanks, Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 09:25, 17 April 2008 (UTC)
according to Utrecht University ( TimothyRias ( talk) 11:39, 17 April 2008 (UTC))
There is now a database containing the references of all WP physics articles (as of April 08). This tool has been used by the Wikiproject Math community since about half a year and, according to the feedback I get, is a valuable tool for simple and quick referencing.
In total, there are 10500 references. You can access the database at http://zeteo.info. The references are linked to their corresponding authors, publishers, and journals respectively. An author/publisher/journal is a separate database entity, thus providing the correct structure to uniformly host additional information like wikilink of an author, issn of a journal etc.
More or less manually I fed the data into the database. It was quite a bit of work to do this. I haven't attempted to verify the information which is now in the database. An in-depth check of a small sample of templates showed, that the stuff is generally pretty well-done, though.
Several options are available; for example it is easy to let it put out something like
for those who prefer footnote-style referencing. For your commodity, there is a little search engine template similar to the google toolbar etc., which can be integrated in the browser's menu. So, no excuses anymore :-) for not referencing an article when you actually know a reference off your head.
Anybody can add/update database items. It is possible to import bibtex files and also wikipedia source code (containing reference templates such as {{ cite}} and {{ citation}}) and let the database parse them, so you can relatively comfortably add the items of your personal bibtex file. A brief documentation can be found here, bugs and questions etc. can be reported at my talk page. Also, if you have ideas how to improve the database, let me know. I'm myself not into physics, so I don't know your guys' needs.
Enjoy! Jakob.scholbach ( talk) 19:24, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
An IP user who has posted as 200.97.93.67 and 189.48.105.246, among others, has been adding stuff about his personal theory to talk pages, including an advertisement for his book, along with stuff on the main pages referencing the talk pages (these have been reverted).
He does this presumably since he knows his essays won't be accepted in the articles. I have deleted all his edits except those that have been replied to, which are on Talk:Wave-particle duality and Talk:Bohr model. Other pages he has edited can be seen in the histories posted above. The way, the truth, and the light ( talk) 07:04, 21 April 2008 (UTC)
I have been updating the list of baryons extensively in the last few days. However, I am not a particle physicist and it would be peachy if one (or twenty hundreds) could visit the List of baryons page and the Talk:List of baryons page to give some feedback and check if explanations given for different stuff makes sense. If you aren't a particle physicist, that's cool too. You could give general feedback about the page and if things were presented clearly. Headbomb ( talk) 20:08, 22 April 2008 (UTC)
Over the past few days there's been a poster using IPs 87.194.39.42 and 84.56.74.246, reverting the redirects at singlet state and triplet state to point at the quantum-mechanical meanings instead of diradical. I didn't want to respond to him directly as he's used vulgar insults, but he does have a point. Therefore, I created the new article spin multiplicity to unify the physics and chemistry links here. I propose that singlet and spin triplet be moved over those redirects, for consistency - I just moved doublet (physics) (yet a third naming convention!) to doublet state, the only one I could do myself. The way, the truth, and the light ( talk) 08:11, 25 April 2008 (UTC)