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. |
If anyone is interested, it appears that a merge was proposed, in July 2010. It was proposed that thsee two articles [1], [2], be merged into this article [3]. No discussion appears to have taken place, hence there appears to be no objection for this set of merged articles. ---- Steve Quinn ( talk) 05:04, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Should Force field (physics) be merged to Field (physics)? If so, let's do it. Biophys ( talk) 20:04, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I think that the definition of force field is wrong. It is not the force, it is the field which is multiplied by the charge (or mass or whatever) of the particle to get the force. In other words, the force fields depend on the environment of the particle, not the particle itself. And it is not just any field, but only those fields which produce forces on particles. JRSpriggs ( talk) 16:30, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
JRSpriggs, I would say that the thing you are talking about is a (normal physical) field, not a force field. Since you're talking about something different, of course you will disagree with the definition. But the definition in the article is actually a definition that many people use, as proven by the citations that I put in. It's not the only definition, but it is a valid definition. This situation is hardly unusual, which is why we have disambiguations. Certainly you can find textbooks that agree with your preferred definition, where "force field" just means electric field or any other physical field. Maybe we can add some more disambiguation-type text to clarify that "force field" may mean other things even within physics and math.
Biophys, of course there is a close relationship between, say, an electric field and its associated force field: The force field F is the electric field E times the charge of the particle under discussion. Certainly it would be silly to discuss the "electric force field" as if it needed to be explained from scratch, when there's already a very nice article on the electric field. In the article there is only one line defining and discussing the electric force field, in terms of the electric field. It just serves as an example of a force field.
The important part of the article, which could be expanded more, is that a line-integral of a force field equals the work moving a particle along that path, and also that the divergence of a force field is zero or nonzero depending on whether or not it is a conservative force. Again, these things form an important and standard part of introductory vector-calculus or mechanics courses. In my first vector-calculus course many years ago (if I recall correctly), the relationship between force fields and work was the main example that motivated the definition of a line integral, long before I knew anything about the physics of electric fields or gravitational fields. -- Steve ( talk) 22:50, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
See WT:AST, a person who deals with languages has asked about why astronomy articles are not using English grammar forms for dashes and hyphenation in terms, instead of spaces. Seems like another WP:DASH headache. 64.229.101.119 ( talk) 04:35, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey everyone, there's a small debate going on over the naming of the article Spark (fire) at its talk page. Any helpful and accurate input is much appreciated. Thanks so much!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 14:05, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone, there's a move request being debated here: Talk:Spark_(fire) as to whether it's accurate to refer to all sparks (of the heated particle kind) as types of fire. Since this seems to be a place where knowledgable science editors would be I ask anyone who potentially knows about the topic to come and give input. Thanks!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 19:03, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
I've tried to make same changes to this article, especially as regards the strange claims as regards the speed of gravity. Maybe other editors should look at it as well. It seems, that there was already an edit war on this article, so someone else should look at it as well. -- D.H ( talk) 21:29, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
As was to be expected, indef blocked user Antichristos ( talk · contribs) is back as Jsdhgsdjhg ( talk · contribs). See these edits. All the sources and most of the text is taken literally from the above collapsed section Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#Speed of gravity. Left a message at blocking admin talk page. DVdm ( talk) 22:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently posted these questions on the talk page for Consciousness Causes Collapse section of Quantum mind–body problem: Does this really mean that a creature's consciousness is somehow creating reality? How many serious physicists believe this?
I also appeal to anyone with knowledge of physics to make pages like this more accessible. The fact is, as a young scientist, I have to care which views scientists in other fields (i.e. physics) rate as most likely to be true, second most likely to be true, etc. So for one, any polls would be of great service.
On the other hand, I like to have as much of an ideas as possible, but sometimes 'explanations' are in deep need of metaphor or simpler summaries that follow them. Maybe someone could do something about this one: "The interpretation identifies the non-linear probabilistic projection transformation which occurs during measurement with the selection of a definite state by a mind from the different possibilities which it could have in a quantum mechanical superposition." It's just sort of left hanging there.
Thanks for your time- Tesseract2 ( talk) 18:35, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Note that "Consciousness Causes Collapse" and the MWI are effectively the same. There is no collapse in the latter case, but you have a superposition of different brains who have observed something differently, so you have an effective collapse in each sector corresponding to each outcome with nonzero amplitude. You can then say that being conscious of some result "causes" the collapse of the wavefunction of the rest of the universe. David Deutsch has shown that the reverse is also true. It is obvious that if you can erase the information you gained from the observation in a reversible way, the system would evolve back to the initial state, according the the MWI. The wavefunction would thus "uncollapse". However, you can do this (theoretically) while still retaining the information that a measurement was carried out. So, you reversibly "forget" the result, but you don't forget that you had measured the system, then the system will still uncollapse according to the MWI. Of course, this can only be done in practice using competely isolated systems, so you need to consider simulating an entire human brain using a quantum computer; the measurement would be something that takes place in the virtual world simulated by the quantum computer.
Count Iblis (
talk)
13:38, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok well, in the end I ended up citing the criticisms against some generally uncontested claims over at
Quantum mind–body problem#"Consciousness causes collapse". If anyone wants to provide second opinions they would be welcome.-
Tesseract2 (
talk)
16:08, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
Eyes needed at new article Doughnut theory of the universe, where the author seems to written a very confused and badly flawed interpretation of a New York Times popular science article. I have left my comments on the article's talk page. Can anything be salvaged from this, or should it go to AfD ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 16:48, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Stumbled upon these. Not too sure if they should be merged, deleted, or redirected... Opinions? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:48, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
The article Particle number, which is rated as High-importance on this project's importance scale, has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 12:21, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
There's an ongoing discussion about cleaning up bibcodes in citations. Feedback is welcome. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:15, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Please check out suspicious edits by 217.172.220.186 ( talk · contribs). He seems to be pushing a theory "Maximum entropy generation in open systems: the Fourth Law?" by Umberto Lucia. (Obviously a whacked idea.) JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:07, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hyperconductor ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is the title of a a new stub-article. I don't see very much in the way of reliable sources for this topic. I found one at Google Books pertaining to Cryogenic Hyperconductors here, another one here, and one that is not WP:RS here. There is also a patent that mentions the word in the body of the proposal, here. ---- Steve Quinn ( talk) 03:11, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Just to note, yesterday it was announced that PRST-AB’s entire archive and all future papers will be made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY) starting from 15 February 2011. It means that with proper citation it could be freely used in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Details here. Dispite it is a primary source it could contain some useful information as well. Artem Korzhimanov ( talk) 16:51, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I don't know where to type this, but isn't the Eddington limit incorrect if stars like R136a1 exist?
The Eddington limit says that stars that are bigger than 120 solar masses (approximately) wouldn't be able to exist... so I thought maybe some mention should be done to this fact.
Thanks.
212.170.135.108 ( talk) 12:33, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
User Bopomofo ( talk · contribs) has been adding what looks like FTL OR to me to various physics articles, but it's outside my area of expertise, and it could do with some more experienced eyes on it.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 03:03, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys, anybody there? This is kind of important, I think. Bopomofo is claiming that energy is transmitted faster than the speed of light. He has a source! If this were real, or even taken seriously, it would be all over the news, right? So it's probably not real (or if it is, then there's some big caveat that needs to be added explaining why it doesn't mean what you might think it does). But I'm not in a position to refute the source given. Someone who is needs to take a look at this. -- Trovatore ( talk) 07:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
There are a large number of links to this page. I'm currently cleaning several physics disambiguation pages (most have 2-3 links that need cleaning up), but this one has around 50 so help would be appreciated. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:49, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
var qqToolConfigCustom=true; // We want a custom config var qqWhichToolBar="tb"; // "cactions" for top, "personal" for very top, or "tb" for sidebar toolbox // (The following) Which tools? true for yes - false for no var qqPeerRev=true; var qqAltImg=true; var qqDablinks=true; var qqExtLink=true; importScript('User:QwerpQwertus/tools.js');
importScript('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js'); // Linkback: [[User:Anomie/linkclassifier.js]] importStylesheet('User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css'); // Linkback: [[User:Anomie/linkclassifier.css]]
Last night I removed an unsourced claim, attributed to Alex Dessler, that the Van Allen radiation belts may be due to volcanic activity. I think this is physically very unlikely, and not at all main-stream, though I am not an expert on Van Allen radiation. A little Google search found ~9000 hits on {'Alex Dessler' 'Van Allen'}, but looking at the top few I see only things that seem to quote our previous Wikipedia article verbatim — almost all having all or part of the phrase:
"while Alex Dessler has argued that the belt is a result of volcanic activity".
Most appear to be blogs & other lightweight material, nothing that looks like a reliable source. A full-text search of the Astrophysics Data System for {"ALEX DESSLER" "VAN ALLEN BELT"} found no hits between 1952 and 2003. (Where would one search for older space physics information, I wonder?)
At first glance it appears to me as if there may have been an avalanche or loop of citations stemming from that very early (~2002) Wikipedia mention. The editor who made the claim was blocked indefinitely in 2008 as a troll, although that was not at first enough to convict the edit. Although "Alex Dessler" is redlinked, he is a reputable worker in space science.
I looked around a bit for a proper source, and commented out the dubious claim, thinking that if there is a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal that supports the claim, we should probably restore it. But I now it looks like this is a classic Wikipedia horror story.
When I could find no reasonable sources (glancing at only 30 or 40, of course not 9000), I sent an email, to Dessler, who quickly responded:
I am (sort of) shocked that this is what is reported. It is true that I once made a verbal joke at a meeting where I was making fun of someone (Tom Gold as I recall) to make the point that correlations were not proof of physical causality. You need a viable theory to make the connection. For example, I like this quote, "It has been proven by thousands of experiments that the beating of tom-toms during an eclipse will restore the Sun." This is from E. Bright Wilsons's book (which I read as a graduate student in the early 1950s) Introduction to Research. Wilson did not believe this correlation was true, as I did not believe volcanoes could cause or have any effect on the Van Allen Belt. My point was regarded as funny enough that I believe Wilmot Hess, in one of his books, quoted me in the spirit of a physicist having fun. If he did, the book would have been published in the 1960s. I never put such nonsense in print -- OMG!
The edit that did the damage was:
Lir made many many edits, often on other subjects, for over 6 years before being blocked, many of which probably need to be reviewed carefully. So it is potentially a more general Wikipedia problem. I think this case history needs to be reported (and discussed) on some of the project pages — physics, astronomy, space science,... as many as are relevant, and wherever Lir made many edits.
This is the first clear instance I have encountered of what appears to be an attempt to undermine the integrity of Wikipedia by deliberate covert fallacious editing. It is not trolling, which I think is defined as a deliberate attempt to create destructive conflict by stirring up conflict, outrage & emotion, etc — ie, not hidden.
Some points:
Thus Wikipedia is at least potentially (and perhaps already extensively) threatened by its own remarkable success.
I am basically a wikignome, by no means very well qualified to address these issues. I am certain there are many other editors in our project who are much more aware than I am. I would appreciate it if they could perhaps give us (me) some advice about how a lay wikipedian can best respond to these challenges, or point to existing WP resources for doing better. Thanks to any who respond.
Cheers, Wwheaton ( talk) 02:57, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Another editor has suggested concentrating all discussion of the above issues for the three related projects on the Astronomy project page, here. I think this sounds like a good idea. Wwheaton ( talk) 04:37, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok I don't really know if this is proper to ask on the project talk page, but I didn't think the guys at village pump would know as much about this as the people here. The spacetime article says "the interval between two events [in spacetime] is defined as ." I've seen this millions of times, and I know it defines the metric tensor of the space, but I've never had anyone explain to me why that sign is negative. I'm trying to grasp (even though my university doesn't offer undergraduate differential geometry classes... a shame) the concept of differential geometry in order to apply it to a space in which some number of dimensions are compactified. If someone could explain that minus sign to me, it would help me out a lot. Thanks, and sorry if this isn't the place to ask.-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 22:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
An IP user ( 129.96.220.98 ( talk · contribs · WHOIS)) has been aggressively arguing for the inclusion of Process Physics ( userspace copy) in the "alternatives to dark matter" section of the Dark matter ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article. After adding it and having the addition reverted multiple times a couple of weeks back, they've changed to arguing without apparent rest on the talk page for its inclusion. More eyes might help.
Based on the WHOIS information for the IP, I fear that there may be WP:COI issues as well. This isn't quite a single-purpose account, but it's close.
I'm out of ideas for how to resolve this. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 06:28, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Update: They swear up and down that they don't have a conflict of interest, and seem to be reacting positively to further discussion of Wikipedia's guidelines for notability, weight, sourcing, and so forth. I've suggested that they try to pull together enough sources to write a version of Process Physics that would survive an AfD (the old one didn't), and that they ask here for guidance. Please bear with them, as they're still learning the ropes. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 08:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey Project physics!
You know when you are at a party and after mentioning that you are a scientist you end up listening to some guy tell you his "theories" on how Buddhism and quantum mechanics are actually the same thing? Imagine that guy taking over the editing of a project physics article.
When was the last time any of you looked at the cold fusion article?
I am writing here to suggest that this article be removed from the project's articles and consigned to the "rational skeptics" wikiprojects.
I view Wikipedia science articles as a resource that I and other researchers use to get a quick and accurate overview of a topic. Wikipedia articles reach a broad scientific audience and can actually be beneficial to the research community's progress towards a better understanding of nature. Conversely, because of it's broad reach, Wikipedia can also have a deleterious effect on research. The cold fusion article falls into the latter category and since there is little interest from actual scientists in editing the article why not be rid of it? Crawdaddy74 ( talk) 16:11, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but why wouldn't you just consider it to be in the domain of both wikiprojects? That happens all the time with other articles. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 03:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Up until recently, we didn't have any article on the concept of a particle, we only had a disambiguation page listing several types of particles, but never a coherent explanation of the concept. It really pissed me off that we lacked a basic explanation of a concept as important as this one, so I got off my ass and fixed that tonight. The "what links here" of particle, particle (disambiguation) and particle physics should probably be cleaned up, so any help doing that would be much appreciated (as well as any expansion of the particle article, of course). Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:33, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
This meaning of "particle" is indeed the primary one. A quick look at the "what links here" gives these mainspace results
Out of 54 links, 3 refers to the grammatical concept ( verb, Udmurt grammar, Contractions of negated auxiliary verbs in English), 2 refers to some artist ( NedFest, Flying Other Brothers), 1 to particle board ( List of gamelan ensembles in the United States), and the rest (48) refers to the concept of particles. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:08, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I've just been pointed to particle again today and having had another look at it I feel an urge to stick an AfD on it. There is no book chapter or paper about particles there, it is somebody's random collection of thoughts about different types of particles. I see it being defended above, anybody like to give one reasonable source which covers a reasonable extent of the topic other than some dictionary definition of a particle? Dmcq ( talk) 17:09, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I have started up an AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Particle. Dmcq ( talk) 23:17, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to bring up a comment that an IP editor left at Talk:Tension (physics) because I feel that is true but needs more big picture foresight than will normally be found on the article talk page. If one looks past the expletives of the comment, he/she is correct in that this article is pretty much wrong and useless in its current state (along with compression (physical)). I bring this up here, because the article needs to be steered in the right direction, and I'm not sure what that is. My recommendations are merging it with compression (physical) under the name tension and compression and then having a short article explaining the concepts (it would be similar to ferrous). The problem with this is that it might just be a dictionary entry. Otherwise, I can see deleting it and compression (physical) and redirecting them to stress (physics), but my problem is that that article is extremely complex in comparison to the concepts that are being searched. I'm not sure either is a great recommendation and welcome conversation and other ideas. Wizard191 ( talk) 19:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
Article Relativistic Doppler effect might need some expert attention w.r.t. new username's Cattlecall1 ( talk · contribs) recent edits. I have reverted twice. DVdm ( talk) 22:46, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey everyone. So I'm bringing up a topic on this page again, so I want to apologize in advance if I'm being a bother. The article on sparks, referring to the small heated particles of matter, is currently titled Spark (fire), although the sparks it discusses are not fire. I was hoping some of the people here who are more knowledgeable on science would be able to weigh in on other possible suggestions at this page. Thanks so much!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 07:31, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I recommend that anyone here look in at the situation on Talk:Spark (fire) before investing much time on this. Wwheaton ( talk) 15:38, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently raised a point at the Robert Oppenheimer featured article discussion over whether electron-positron theory should have its own article. I suggested that the closest we have at the moment is Dirac sea. Currently there are few references to it on Wikipedia, but search engines give a fair number of hits for the phrase + Dirac. See also Dirac's Nobel lecture. Would those reading this be able to say whether electron-positron theory should have its own article, or maybe a redirect to a suitable article? Carcharoth ( talk) 15:17, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
Just created this earlier. If you know of any other experiments, feel free to add them to the template. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:58, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
Isotherm is currently a disambiguation page. Please help to answer a question I posed on its talk page. -- Lambiam 16:00, 27 February 2011 (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. |
If anyone is interested, it appears that a merge was proposed, in July 2010. It was proposed that thsee two articles [1], [2], be merged into this article [3]. No discussion appears to have taken place, hence there appears to be no objection for this set of merged articles. ---- Steve Quinn ( talk) 05:04, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
Should Force field (physics) be merged to Field (physics)? If so, let's do it. Biophys ( talk) 20:04, 31 January 2011 (UTC)
I think that the definition of force field is wrong. It is not the force, it is the field which is multiplied by the charge (or mass or whatever) of the particle to get the force. In other words, the force fields depend on the environment of the particle, not the particle itself. And it is not just any field, but only those fields which produce forces on particles. JRSpriggs ( talk) 16:30, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
JRSpriggs, I would say that the thing you are talking about is a (normal physical) field, not a force field. Since you're talking about something different, of course you will disagree with the definition. But the definition in the article is actually a definition that many people use, as proven by the citations that I put in. It's not the only definition, but it is a valid definition. This situation is hardly unusual, which is why we have disambiguations. Certainly you can find textbooks that agree with your preferred definition, where "force field" just means electric field or any other physical field. Maybe we can add some more disambiguation-type text to clarify that "force field" may mean other things even within physics and math.
Biophys, of course there is a close relationship between, say, an electric field and its associated force field: The force field F is the electric field E times the charge of the particle under discussion. Certainly it would be silly to discuss the "electric force field" as if it needed to be explained from scratch, when there's already a very nice article on the electric field. In the article there is only one line defining and discussing the electric force field, in terms of the electric field. It just serves as an example of a force field.
The important part of the article, which could be expanded more, is that a line-integral of a force field equals the work moving a particle along that path, and also that the divergence of a force field is zero or nonzero depending on whether or not it is a conservative force. Again, these things form an important and standard part of introductory vector-calculus or mechanics courses. In my first vector-calculus course many years ago (if I recall correctly), the relationship between force fields and work was the main example that motivated the definition of a line integral, long before I knew anything about the physics of electric fields or gravitational fields. -- Steve ( talk) 22:50, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
See WT:AST, a person who deals with languages has asked about why astronomy articles are not using English grammar forms for dashes and hyphenation in terms, instead of spaces. Seems like another WP:DASH headache. 64.229.101.119 ( talk) 04:35, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey everyone, there's a small debate going on over the naming of the article Spark (fire) at its talk page. Any helpful and accurate input is much appreciated. Thanks so much!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 14:05, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi everyone, there's a move request being debated here: Talk:Spark_(fire) as to whether it's accurate to refer to all sparks (of the heated particle kind) as types of fire. Since this seems to be a place where knowledgable science editors would be I ask anyone who potentially knows about the topic to come and give input. Thanks!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 19:03, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
I've tried to make same changes to this article, especially as regards the strange claims as regards the speed of gravity. Maybe other editors should look at it as well. It seems, that there was already an edit war on this article, so someone else should look at it as well. -- D.H ( talk) 21:29, 5 February 2011 (UTC)
As was to be expected, indef blocked user Antichristos ( talk · contribs) is back as Jsdhgsdjhg ( talk · contribs). See these edits. All the sources and most of the text is taken literally from the above collapsed section Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics#Speed of gravity. Left a message at blocking admin talk page. DVdm ( talk) 22:03, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently posted these questions on the talk page for Consciousness Causes Collapse section of Quantum mind–body problem: Does this really mean that a creature's consciousness is somehow creating reality? How many serious physicists believe this?
I also appeal to anyone with knowledge of physics to make pages like this more accessible. The fact is, as a young scientist, I have to care which views scientists in other fields (i.e. physics) rate as most likely to be true, second most likely to be true, etc. So for one, any polls would be of great service.
On the other hand, I like to have as much of an ideas as possible, but sometimes 'explanations' are in deep need of metaphor or simpler summaries that follow them. Maybe someone could do something about this one: "The interpretation identifies the non-linear probabilistic projection transformation which occurs during measurement with the selection of a definite state by a mind from the different possibilities which it could have in a quantum mechanical superposition." It's just sort of left hanging there.
Thanks for your time- Tesseract2 ( talk) 18:35, 1 February 2011 (UTC)
Note that "Consciousness Causes Collapse" and the MWI are effectively the same. There is no collapse in the latter case, but you have a superposition of different brains who have observed something differently, so you have an effective collapse in each sector corresponding to each outcome with nonzero amplitude. You can then say that being conscious of some result "causes" the collapse of the wavefunction of the rest of the universe. David Deutsch has shown that the reverse is also true. It is obvious that if you can erase the information you gained from the observation in a reversible way, the system would evolve back to the initial state, according the the MWI. The wavefunction would thus "uncollapse". However, you can do this (theoretically) while still retaining the information that a measurement was carried out. So, you reversibly "forget" the result, but you don't forget that you had measured the system, then the system will still uncollapse according to the MWI. Of course, this can only be done in practice using competely isolated systems, so you need to consider simulating an entire human brain using a quantum computer; the measurement would be something that takes place in the virtual world simulated by the quantum computer.
Count Iblis (
talk)
13:38, 2 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok well, in the end I ended up citing the criticisms against some generally uncontested claims over at
Quantum mind–body problem#"Consciousness causes collapse". If anyone wants to provide second opinions they would be welcome.-
Tesseract2 (
talk)
16:08, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
Eyes needed at new article Doughnut theory of the universe, where the author seems to written a very confused and badly flawed interpretation of a New York Times popular science article. I have left my comments on the article's talk page. Can anything be salvaged from this, or should it go to AfD ? Gandalf61 ( talk) 16:48, 6 February 2011 (UTC)
Stumbled upon these. Not too sure if they should be merged, deleted, or redirected... Opinions? Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 07:48, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
The article Particle number, which is rated as High-importance on this project's importance scale, has been nominated for deletion. -- Lambiam 12:21, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
There's an ongoing discussion about cleaning up bibcodes in citations. Feedback is welcome. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 03:15, 12 February 2011 (UTC)
Please check out suspicious edits by 217.172.220.186 ( talk · contribs). He seems to be pushing a theory "Maximum entropy generation in open systems: the Fourth Law?" by Umberto Lucia. (Obviously a whacked idea.) JRSpriggs ( talk) 13:07, 15 February 2011 (UTC)
Hyperconductor ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) is the title of a a new stub-article. I don't see very much in the way of reliable sources for this topic. I found one at Google Books pertaining to Cryogenic Hyperconductors here, another one here, and one that is not WP:RS here. There is also a patent that mentions the word in the body of the proposal, here. ---- Steve Quinn ( talk) 03:11, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Just to note, yesterday it was announced that PRST-AB’s entire archive and all future papers will be made available under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC-BY) starting from 15 February 2011. It means that with proper citation it could be freely used in Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Details here. Dispite it is a primary source it could contain some useful information as well. Artem Korzhimanov ( talk) 16:51, 16 February 2011 (UTC)
Hi, I don't know where to type this, but isn't the Eddington limit incorrect if stars like R136a1 exist?
The Eddington limit says that stars that are bigger than 120 solar masses (approximately) wouldn't be able to exist... so I thought maybe some mention should be done to this fact.
Thanks.
212.170.135.108 ( talk) 12:33, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
User Bopomofo ( talk · contribs) has been adding what looks like FTL OR to me to various physics articles, but it's outside my area of expertise, and it could do with some more experienced eyes on it.-- JohnBlackburne words deeds 03:03, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey guys, anybody there? This is kind of important, I think. Bopomofo is claiming that energy is transmitted faster than the speed of light. He has a source! If this were real, or even taken seriously, it would be all over the news, right? So it's probably not real (or if it is, then there's some big caveat that needs to be added explaining why it doesn't mean what you might think it does). But I'm not in a position to refute the source given. Someone who is needs to take a look at this. -- Trovatore ( talk) 07:06, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
There are a large number of links to this page. I'm currently cleaning several physics disambiguation pages (most have 2-3 links that need cleaning up), but this one has around 50 so help would be appreciated. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 20:49, 18 February 2011 (UTC)
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Last night I removed an unsourced claim, attributed to Alex Dessler, that the Van Allen radiation belts may be due to volcanic activity. I think this is physically very unlikely, and not at all main-stream, though I am not an expert on Van Allen radiation. A little Google search found ~9000 hits on {'Alex Dessler' 'Van Allen'}, but looking at the top few I see only things that seem to quote our previous Wikipedia article verbatim — almost all having all or part of the phrase:
"while Alex Dessler has argued that the belt is a result of volcanic activity".
Most appear to be blogs & other lightweight material, nothing that looks like a reliable source. A full-text search of the Astrophysics Data System for {"ALEX DESSLER" "VAN ALLEN BELT"} found no hits between 1952 and 2003. (Where would one search for older space physics information, I wonder?)
At first glance it appears to me as if there may have been an avalanche or loop of citations stemming from that very early (~2002) Wikipedia mention. The editor who made the claim was blocked indefinitely in 2008 as a troll, although that was not at first enough to convict the edit. Although "Alex Dessler" is redlinked, he is a reputable worker in space science.
I looked around a bit for a proper source, and commented out the dubious claim, thinking that if there is a peer-reviewed article in a scientific journal that supports the claim, we should probably restore it. But I now it looks like this is a classic Wikipedia horror story.
When I could find no reasonable sources (glancing at only 30 or 40, of course not 9000), I sent an email, to Dessler, who quickly responded:
I am (sort of) shocked that this is what is reported. It is true that I once made a verbal joke at a meeting where I was making fun of someone (Tom Gold as I recall) to make the point that correlations were not proof of physical causality. You need a viable theory to make the connection. For example, I like this quote, "It has been proven by thousands of experiments that the beating of tom-toms during an eclipse will restore the Sun." This is from E. Bright Wilsons's book (which I read as a graduate student in the early 1950s) Introduction to Research. Wilson did not believe this correlation was true, as I did not believe volcanoes could cause or have any effect on the Van Allen Belt. My point was regarded as funny enough that I believe Wilmot Hess, in one of his books, quoted me in the spirit of a physicist having fun. If he did, the book would have been published in the 1960s. I never put such nonsense in print -- OMG!
The edit that did the damage was:
Lir made many many edits, often on other subjects, for over 6 years before being blocked, many of which probably need to be reviewed carefully. So it is potentially a more general Wikipedia problem. I think this case history needs to be reported (and discussed) on some of the project pages — physics, astronomy, space science,... as many as are relevant, and wherever Lir made many edits.
This is the first clear instance I have encountered of what appears to be an attempt to undermine the integrity of Wikipedia by deliberate covert fallacious editing. It is not trolling, which I think is defined as a deliberate attempt to create destructive conflict by stirring up conflict, outrage & emotion, etc — ie, not hidden.
Some points:
Thus Wikipedia is at least potentially (and perhaps already extensively) threatened by its own remarkable success.
I am basically a wikignome, by no means very well qualified to address these issues. I am certain there are many other editors in our project who are much more aware than I am. I would appreciate it if they could perhaps give us (me) some advice about how a lay wikipedian can best respond to these challenges, or point to existing WP resources for doing better. Thanks to any who respond.
Cheers, Wwheaton ( talk) 02:57, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Another editor has suggested concentrating all discussion of the above issues for the three related projects on the Astronomy project page, here. I think this sounds like a good idea. Wwheaton ( talk) 04:37, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
Ok I don't really know if this is proper to ask on the project talk page, but I didn't think the guys at village pump would know as much about this as the people here. The spacetime article says "the interval between two events [in spacetime] is defined as ." I've seen this millions of times, and I know it defines the metric tensor of the space, but I've never had anyone explain to me why that sign is negative. I'm trying to grasp (even though my university doesn't offer undergraduate differential geometry classes... a shame) the concept of differential geometry in order to apply it to a space in which some number of dimensions are compactified. If someone could explain that minus sign to me, it would help me out a lot. Thanks, and sorry if this isn't the place to ask.-- Dudemanfellabra ( talk) 22:46, 19 February 2011 (UTC)
An IP user ( 129.96.220.98 ( talk · contribs · WHOIS)) has been aggressively arguing for the inclusion of Process Physics ( userspace copy) in the "alternatives to dark matter" section of the Dark matter ( | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) article. After adding it and having the addition reverted multiple times a couple of weeks back, they've changed to arguing without apparent rest on the talk page for its inclusion. More eyes might help.
Based on the WHOIS information for the IP, I fear that there may be WP:COI issues as well. This isn't quite a single-purpose account, but it's close.
I'm out of ideas for how to resolve this. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 06:28, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Update: They swear up and down that they don't have a conflict of interest, and seem to be reacting positively to further discussion of Wikipedia's guidelines for notability, weight, sourcing, and so forth. I've suggested that they try to pull together enough sources to write a version of Process Physics that would survive an AfD (the old one didn't), and that they ask here for guidance. Please bear with them, as they're still learning the ropes. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 08:03, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey Project physics!
You know when you are at a party and after mentioning that you are a scientist you end up listening to some guy tell you his "theories" on how Buddhism and quantum mechanics are actually the same thing? Imagine that guy taking over the editing of a project physics article.
When was the last time any of you looked at the cold fusion article?
I am writing here to suggest that this article be removed from the project's articles and consigned to the "rational skeptics" wikiprojects.
I view Wikipedia science articles as a resource that I and other researchers use to get a quick and accurate overview of a topic. Wikipedia articles reach a broad scientific audience and can actually be beneficial to the research community's progress towards a better understanding of nature. Conversely, because of it's broad reach, Wikipedia can also have a deleterious effect on research. The cold fusion article falls into the latter category and since there is little interest from actual scientists in editing the article why not be rid of it? Crawdaddy74 ( talk) 16:11, 22 February 2011 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm missing something here, but why wouldn't you just consider it to be in the domain of both wikiprojects? That happens all the time with other articles. -- Christopher Thomas ( talk) 03:54, 23 February 2011 (UTC)
Up until recently, we didn't have any article on the concept of a particle, we only had a disambiguation page listing several types of particles, but never a coherent explanation of the concept. It really pissed me off that we lacked a basic explanation of a concept as important as this one, so I got off my ass and fixed that tonight. The "what links here" of particle, particle (disambiguation) and particle physics should probably be cleaned up, so any help doing that would be much appreciated (as well as any expansion of the particle article, of course). Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:33, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
This meaning of "particle" is indeed the primary one. A quick look at the "what links here" gives these mainspace results
Out of 54 links, 3 refers to the grammatical concept ( verb, Udmurt grammar, Contractions of negated auxiliary verbs in English), 2 refers to some artist ( NedFest, Flying Other Brothers), 1 to particle board ( List of gamelan ensembles in the United States), and the rest (48) refers to the concept of particles. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 12:08, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
I've just been pointed to particle again today and having had another look at it I feel an urge to stick an AfD on it. There is no book chapter or paper about particles there, it is somebody's random collection of thoughts about different types of particles. I see it being defended above, anybody like to give one reasonable source which covers a reasonable extent of the topic other than some dictionary definition of a particle? Dmcq ( talk) 17:09, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I have started up an AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Particle. Dmcq ( talk) 23:17, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I'd like to bring up a comment that an IP editor left at Talk:Tension (physics) because I feel that is true but needs more big picture foresight than will normally be found on the article talk page. If one looks past the expletives of the comment, he/she is correct in that this article is pretty much wrong and useless in its current state (along with compression (physical)). I bring this up here, because the article needs to be steered in the right direction, and I'm not sure what that is. My recommendations are merging it with compression (physical) under the name tension and compression and then having a short article explaining the concepts (it would be similar to ferrous). The problem with this is that it might just be a dictionary entry. Otherwise, I can see deleting it and compression (physical) and redirecting them to stress (physics), but my problem is that that article is extremely complex in comparison to the concepts that are being searched. I'm not sure either is a great recommendation and welcome conversation and other ideas. Wizard191 ( talk) 19:04, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
Article Relativistic Doppler effect might need some expert attention w.r.t. new username's Cattlecall1 ( talk · contribs) recent edits. I have reverted twice. DVdm ( talk) 22:46, 25 February 2011 (UTC)
Hey everyone. So I'm bringing up a topic on this page again, so I want to apologize in advance if I'm being a bother. The article on sparks, referring to the small heated particles of matter, is currently titled Spark (fire), although the sparks it discusses are not fire. I was hoping some of the people here who are more knowledgeable on science would be able to weigh in on other possible suggestions at this page. Thanks so much!-- Yaksar (let's chat) 07:31, 24 February 2011 (UTC)
I recommend that anyone here look in at the situation on Talk:Spark (fire) before investing much time on this. Wwheaton ( talk) 15:38, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
I recently raised a point at the Robert Oppenheimer featured article discussion over whether electron-positron theory should have its own article. I suggested that the closest we have at the moment is Dirac sea. Currently there are few references to it on Wikipedia, but search engines give a fair number of hits for the phrase + Dirac. See also Dirac's Nobel lecture. Would those reading this be able to say whether electron-positron theory should have its own article, or maybe a redirect to a suitable article? Carcharoth ( talk) 15:17, 26 February 2011 (UTC)
Just created this earlier. If you know of any other experiments, feel free to add them to the template. Headbomb { talk / contribs / physics / books} 08:58, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
Isotherm is currently a disambiguation page. Please help to answer a question I posed on its talk page. -- Lambiam 16:00, 27 February 2011 (UTC)