![]() | 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. |
While cleaning up other articles, I noticed that Flash.starwalker ( talk · contribs) was adding editorial-style comments into several articles on my watchlist. He appears to be acting in good faith, and the usual mechanisms for editing/revising content should work for those articles. Where they might not be working is Jack Sarfatti ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), which this user devoted a substantial amount of time to earlier in the month. I'm am not familiar with the article's subject. Could someone who is please take a look at this set of changes? Based on the editor's past efforts, I consider it likely that the changes will need vetting. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 18:53, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Please review the talk-page thread at Talk:Pioneer anomaly#Russel Humphreys. An editor added a section titled "creationist explanation", I removed it, another editor re-added it, and that's where the situation presently stands. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 19:30, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
There's a dispute brewing at Talk:Vacuum permeability which affects that article and also Ampère's force law. Does the force per unit length between two current-carrying wires vary as the inverse-square of the distance between them, or simply as the inverse of the distance? Common sense would suggest the former, but Wikipedia states the latter. Physchim62 (talk) 16:28, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I have tried to find but I cannot find an article that describes E and B in terms of annihilation and creation operators of the field. Do we even have an article on the quantization of th free electromagneic field and space time commutation relations of the field [E,E] [E,B] and how the Heisenberg eqution of the field gives the Maxwell's equation. This is quantum optics. If this kind of information is not there, then I will make a new page and put it in. Kanwarpreet Grewal 19:23, 2 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kp grewal ( talk • contribs)
If someone creates a page to promote their new theory of Abso-Relative Hydro-Kinetic Gravity, it's short work to dispose of it. But I believe there are a large number of pages describing physical ideas by university academics, which go into the details of the idea but which don't mention that almost no-one else accepts the idea. Dark energy star and Algebraic holography would be examples.
At Talk:Dark_energy_star#Almost_no-one_is_interested_in_this_concept I have suggested a way to deal with this, namely, redirects to pages of the form Alternative theories of .... Is there anything like this policy already in effect? Mporter ( talk) 10:14, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
The Discrete Field Model ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article could probably use attention from experts in the field. A skim suggests that it's mostly WP:SYN, attempting to unify GR and quantum mechanics, but I could be misreading (it might instead just be describing some commonly-used technique/approach for constructing such theories that I'm unfamiliar with). The article appears to be mostly the work of one editor. There's been talk page chatter about the quality of the article, but nobody on any side in that discussion seems to be making useful statements ("the article is horrible"/"the article is great", vs. "x, y, and z are problems"). -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 22:50, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Update: This now has an AfD, at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Discrete Field Model. Please take a few minutes to review the article and comment at the AfD. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 04:47, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
There is a merge suggestion at WT:AST about merging Central body and Orbiting body among other terms that have really short articles, into a Glossary of astrodynamics.
65.94.253.16 ( talk) 05:05, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
| ||||||||
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter |
As detailed in last week's Signpost, WildBot has been patrolling Wikipedia-Books and searched for various problems in them, such as books having duplicate articles or containing redirects. WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is in the process of cleaning them up, but help would be appreciated. For this project, the following books have problems:
The problem reports explain in details what exactly are the problems, why they are problems, and how to fix them. This way anyone can fix them even if they aren't familiar with books. If you don't see something that looks like this, then all problems have been fixed. (Please strike articles from this list as the problems get fixed.)
Also, the {{ saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of books (title, subtitle, cover-image, cover-color), and gives are preview of the default cover on the book's page. An example of such a cover is found on the right. Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class physics articles should have covers.
If you need help with cleaning up a book, help with the {{ saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.
This message was delivered by User:EarwigBot, at 00:44, 8 April 2010 (UTC), on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. EarwigBot ( owner • talk) 00:44, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
A large-scale rewrite of Particle accelerator ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is occurring, by a user who appears to have returned to it after a long absence (reactivating threads that went stale 2008-ish). The rewrite isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the discussion could use extra eyes. I'm hoping to take a look at it over the weekend, but my track record with that isn't very good (as I'm quite busy off-wiki). Furthermore, the editor in question seems to take lack of response as agreement, so a more prompt review might be in order. They're acting in good faith and with knowledge of the subject; my concern is that they're unilaterally making changes without what I'd consider to be sufficient discussion beforehand. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 08:11, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Standard assumptions in astrodynamics is at articles for deletion. It is somewhat unusual for an article, yet there are lots of pages that link to it, so I thought I would mention it here for anyone interested. Johnuniq ( talk) 07:23, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
While looking for a suitable link target for "null path" in "The speed of light [...] is [...] the speed of a null path in relativity", I found the following absurdities:
Something must be done about that, especially Light-like and Lightlike going to different places. Any ideas? (BTW, I've pointed the link for "null path" in that sentence to Null geodesic, but I'm not convinced it was the best choice.) ― ___A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 16:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
The Silex Process article is currently rated as low-importance on the WikiProject Physics importance scale. This may be correct; I don't know. I had never heard of SILEX until a few days ago. However, given the recent (cited) update to the article that "concerns were raised the process poses a threat to global nuclear security, being 75% smaller and consuming considerably less energy than current enrichment technologies, it is almost undetectable from orbit potentially allowing rogue nations activities' to go undetected by the international community.", I would suggest that it would be good for more physics-oriented experts than I reassess the importance classification. That is my suggestion. Cheers. N2e ( talk) 01:05, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I read this article, and I just can't help but feel that it is arguing "for" this model based, trying to associate it with big names in physics, rather than present the model and it's current acceptance (i.e., little, if at all). Many questionable (at best) sources at used, such as fringe journal Galilean Electrodynamics are used, and the history section seem to be original synthesis, rather than be based on reviews of the model. There is also a jarring discontinuity of tone when getting to the "current status" (which I think is fine, if a bit short), since the reader has been primed all the way to think this is an accepted model, confirmed by experiment. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:05, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I make this proposal with all due humility, and I recognize that it is not my place to criticize, as I have not, to date, made any contributions to Physics articles in Wikipedia.
I propose that authors and editors of relatively arcane physics articles, such as that on Scalar field theory (as opposed to one such as atom) be written on two levels, elementary and advanced. To see the benefit of such an approach, I recommend a review of the book Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. Basically, I think articles on topics that are likely to be over the heads of most readers of Wikipedia should have an alternate track, or several paragraphs in the way of an elementary introduction that explains the topic on the level of, say, a science article in the New York Times, or Scientific American. (I admit that this task will be far from trivial for many topics in physics that are normally discussed largely in terms of the equations.)
The alternative is articles that are not useful to nearly as many readers as they could be.
I experienced this same phenomenon in reading the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. I actually had the hard-copy of this tome in the '80s. It included a one volume Propædia, a one-volume 'topical organization' of the encyclopedia, an Outline of Knowledge which one might use as a guide to studying any and all fields of knowledge contained in the encyclopedia. I opened it to the first two sections, which were Matter and Energy >> Atoms >> Structure and Properties of Atoms & Energy >> Atoms >> Atomic Nuclei and Elementary Particles. I don't remember which of these two articles I got into, but I believe it was Atomic Nuclei. I started reading, and within a page or two, I was lost. I could not really follow the article. This was within 10 years of my receiving a BS in Physics at MIT. This article had been written by a physicist, but not in such a way that it could be understood by an intelligent layperson. Perhaps if I'd gotten a Master's Degree....
Again, no disrespect meant. I applaud you who have taken the time to write physics articles for Wikipedia. I just think they could be made more accessible. — Paulmlieberman ( talk) 17:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I've updated my list of missing physics topics - Skysmith ( talk) 13:31, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Are the Nearly free electron model and the Free electron model the same thing? If so we need a merge. If not they need to be properly distinguished in both articles. -- Bduke (Discussion) 22:56, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I nominated this article for Featured List status. The review page is here. Ruslik_ Zero 12:32, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
An eager editor is overhauling the article Weight, thereby turning it into what seems a mess to me. Is weight a vector quantity or a scalar? Our article Mass versus weight states once that it is a vector, but then consistently treats it as a scalar. Weightlessness holds that it is a scalar ("the size of the force of gravity acting on an object"), as did Weight before the "Correction" began ("the magnitude, W, of the force that must be applied to an object in order to support it"). Whichever is the best approach, consistency across articles and inside articles is also desirable. -- Lambiam 22:07, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
As I described here, I want to activate my bot to add the syntax {{Portal|Physics}} in all the pages that is related to Physics. In this manner more readers will visit portal:Physics.
-- Aushulz ( talk) 12:34, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
{{
portal|physics}}
to articles, it should be in the see also section.
70.29.208.247 (
talk) 05:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)Could someone please take a look at the edit-semiprotected request in Talk:Physics#The_scientific_method (if it has not been done by the time you read this), thanks, Chzz ► 18:35, 27 April 2010 (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. |
While cleaning up other articles, I noticed that Flash.starwalker ( talk · contribs) was adding editorial-style comments into several articles on my watchlist. He appears to be acting in good faith, and the usual mechanisms for editing/revising content should work for those articles. Where they might not be working is Jack Sarfatti ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views), which this user devoted a substantial amount of time to earlier in the month. I'm am not familiar with the article's subject. Could someone who is please take a look at this set of changes? Based on the editor's past efforts, I consider it likely that the changes will need vetting. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 18:53, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
Please review the talk-page thread at Talk:Pioneer anomaly#Russel Humphreys. An editor added a section titled "creationist explanation", I removed it, another editor re-added it, and that's where the situation presently stands. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 19:30, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
There's a dispute brewing at Talk:Vacuum permeability which affects that article and also Ampère's force law. Does the force per unit length between two current-carrying wires vary as the inverse-square of the distance between them, or simply as the inverse of the distance? Common sense would suggest the former, but Wikipedia states the latter. Physchim62 (talk) 16:28, 1 April 2010 (UTC)
I have tried to find but I cannot find an article that describes E and B in terms of annihilation and creation operators of the field. Do we even have an article on the quantization of th free electromagneic field and space time commutation relations of the field [E,E] [E,B] and how the Heisenberg eqution of the field gives the Maxwell's equation. This is quantum optics. If this kind of information is not there, then I will make a new page and put it in. Kanwarpreet Grewal 19:23, 2 April 2010 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Kp grewal ( talk • contribs)
If someone creates a page to promote their new theory of Abso-Relative Hydro-Kinetic Gravity, it's short work to dispose of it. But I believe there are a large number of pages describing physical ideas by university academics, which go into the details of the idea but which don't mention that almost no-one else accepts the idea. Dark energy star and Algebraic holography would be examples.
At Talk:Dark_energy_star#Almost_no-one_is_interested_in_this_concept I have suggested a way to deal with this, namely, redirects to pages of the form Alternative theories of .... Is there anything like this policy already in effect? Mporter ( talk) 10:14, 3 April 2010 (UTC)
The Discrete Field Model ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article could probably use attention from experts in the field. A skim suggests that it's mostly WP:SYN, attempting to unify GR and quantum mechanics, but I could be misreading (it might instead just be describing some commonly-used technique/approach for constructing such theories that I'm unfamiliar with). The article appears to be mostly the work of one editor. There's been talk page chatter about the quality of the article, but nobody on any side in that discussion seems to be making useful statements ("the article is horrible"/"the article is great", vs. "x, y, and z are problems"). -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 22:50, 31 March 2010 (UTC)
Update: This now has an AfD, at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Discrete Field Model. Please take a few minutes to review the article and comment at the AfD. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 04:47, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
There is a merge suggestion at WT:AST about merging Central body and Orbiting body among other terms that have really short articles, into a Glossary of astrodynamics.
65.94.253.16 ( talk) 05:05, 7 April 2010 (UTC)
| ||||||||
An example of a book cover, taken from Book:Hadronic Matter |
As detailed in last week's Signpost, WildBot has been patrolling Wikipedia-Books and searched for various problems in them, such as books having duplicate articles or containing redirects. WikiProject Wikipedia-Books is in the process of cleaning them up, but help would be appreciated. For this project, the following books have problems:
The problem reports explain in details what exactly are the problems, why they are problems, and how to fix them. This way anyone can fix them even if they aren't familiar with books. If you don't see something that looks like this, then all problems have been fixed. (Please strike articles from this list as the problems get fixed.)
Also, the {{ saved book}} template has been updated to allow editors to specify the default covers of books (title, subtitle, cover-image, cover-color), and gives are preview of the default cover on the book's page. An example of such a cover is found on the right. Ideally, all books in Category:Book-Class physics articles should have covers.
If you need help with cleaning up a book, help with the {{ saved book}} template, or have any questions about books in general, see Help:Books, Wikipedia:Books, and Wikipedia:WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, or ask me on my talk page. Also feel free to join WikiProject Wikipedia-Books, as we need all the help we can get.
This message was delivered by User:EarwigBot, at 00:44, 8 April 2010 (UTC), on behalf of Headbomb. Headbomb probably isn't watching this page, so if you want him to reply here, just leave him a message on his talk page. EarwigBot ( owner • talk) 00:44, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
A large-scale rewrite of Particle accelerator ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is occurring, by a user who appears to have returned to it after a long absence (reactivating threads that went stale 2008-ish). The rewrite isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the discussion could use extra eyes. I'm hoping to take a look at it over the weekend, but my track record with that isn't very good (as I'm quite busy off-wiki). Furthermore, the editor in question seems to take lack of response as agreement, so a more prompt review might be in order. They're acting in good faith and with knowledge of the subject; my concern is that they're unilaterally making changes without what I'd consider to be sufficient discussion beforehand. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 08:11, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Standard assumptions in astrodynamics is at articles for deletion. It is somewhat unusual for an article, yet there are lots of pages that link to it, so I thought I would mention it here for anyone interested. Johnuniq ( talk) 07:23, 11 April 2010 (UTC)
While looking for a suitable link target for "null path" in "The speed of light [...] is [...] the speed of a null path in relativity", I found the following absurdities:
Something must be done about that, especially Light-like and Lightlike going to different places. Any ideas? (BTW, I've pointed the link for "null path" in that sentence to Null geodesic, but I'm not convinced it was the best choice.) ― ___A._di_M. (formerly Army1987) 16:04, 13 April 2010 (UTC)
The Silex Process article is currently rated as low-importance on the WikiProject Physics importance scale. This may be correct; I don't know. I had never heard of SILEX until a few days ago. However, given the recent (cited) update to the article that "concerns were raised the process poses a threat to global nuclear security, being 75% smaller and consuming considerably less energy than current enrichment technologies, it is almost undetectable from orbit potentially allowing rogue nations activities' to go undetected by the international community.", I would suggest that it would be good for more physics-oriented experts than I reassess the importance classification. That is my suggestion. Cheers. N2e ( talk) 01:05, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I read this article, and I just can't help but feel that it is arguing "for" this model based, trying to associate it with big names in physics, rather than present the model and it's current acceptance (i.e., little, if at all). Many questionable (at best) sources at used, such as fringe journal Galilean Electrodynamics are used, and the history section seem to be original synthesis, rather than be based on reviews of the model. There is also a jarring discontinuity of tone when getting to the "current status" (which I think is fine, if a bit short), since the reader has been primed all the way to think this is an accepted model, confirmed by experiment. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 21:05, 17 April 2010 (UTC)
I make this proposal with all due humility, and I recognize that it is not my place to criticize, as I have not, to date, made any contributions to Physics articles in Wikipedia.
I propose that authors and editors of relatively arcane physics articles, such as that on Scalar field theory (as opposed to one such as atom) be written on two levels, elementary and advanced. To see the benefit of such an approach, I recommend a review of the book Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler. Basically, I think articles on topics that are likely to be over the heads of most readers of Wikipedia should have an alternate track, or several paragraphs in the way of an elementary introduction that explains the topic on the level of, say, a science article in the New York Times, or Scientific American. (I admit that this task will be far from trivial for many topics in physics that are normally discussed largely in terms of the equations.)
The alternative is articles that are not useful to nearly as many readers as they could be.
I experienced this same phenomenon in reading the 15th edition of Encyclopedia Britannica. I actually had the hard-copy of this tome in the '80s. It included a one volume Propædia, a one-volume 'topical organization' of the encyclopedia, an Outline of Knowledge which one might use as a guide to studying any and all fields of knowledge contained in the encyclopedia. I opened it to the first two sections, which were Matter and Energy >> Atoms >> Structure and Properties of Atoms & Energy >> Atoms >> Atomic Nuclei and Elementary Particles. I don't remember which of these two articles I got into, but I believe it was Atomic Nuclei. I started reading, and within a page or two, I was lost. I could not really follow the article. This was within 10 years of my receiving a BS in Physics at MIT. This article had been written by a physicist, but not in such a way that it could be understood by an intelligent layperson. Perhaps if I'd gotten a Master's Degree....
Again, no disrespect meant. I applaud you who have taken the time to write physics articles for Wikipedia. I just think they could be made more accessible. — Paulmlieberman ( talk) 17:15, 30 March 2010 (UTC)
I've updated my list of missing physics topics - Skysmith ( talk) 13:31, 8 April 2010 (UTC)
Are the Nearly free electron model and the Free electron model the same thing? If so we need a merge. If not they need to be properly distinguished in both articles. -- Bduke (Discussion) 22:56, 25 April 2010 (UTC)
I nominated this article for Featured List status. The review page is here. Ruslik_ Zero 12:32, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
An eager editor is overhauling the article Weight, thereby turning it into what seems a mess to me. Is weight a vector quantity or a scalar? Our article Mass versus weight states once that it is a vector, but then consistently treats it as a scalar. Weightlessness holds that it is a scalar ("the size of the force of gravity acting on an object"), as did Weight before the "Correction" began ("the magnitude, W, of the force that must be applied to an object in order to support it"). Whichever is the best approach, consistency across articles and inside articles is also desirable. -- Lambiam 22:07, 26 April 2010 (UTC)
As I described here, I want to activate my bot to add the syntax {{Portal|Physics}} in all the pages that is related to Physics. In this manner more readers will visit portal:Physics.
-- Aushulz ( talk) 12:34, 27 April 2010 (UTC)
{{
portal|physics}}
to articles, it should be in the see also section.
70.29.208.247 (
talk) 05:32, 29 April 2010 (UTC)Could someone please take a look at the edit-semiprotected request in Talk:Physics#The_scientific_method (if it has not been done by the time you read this), thanks, Chzz ► 18:35, 27 April 2010 (UTC)