Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive April 2021

Superfluid vacuum theory

In need of cleanup, for reasons stated in the boxes: Superfluid vacuum theory. XOR'easter (talk) 03:42, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

AFP Project

• FP420 experiment (AfD discussion)

I suspect that your assistance is needed in bringing an article largely untouched since 2010 up to date. Two of you are already there. ☺ Uncle G (talk) 07:20, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Variable speed of light

Can anybody that understands general relativity take a look at Variable speed of light? I'm worried about the section Variable_speed_of_light#Historical_proposals, it seems to doing original research about what Einstein had in mind, and misunderstanding how the speed of light works in general relativity. As far as I understand in GR the speed of light is constant in an extended free-falling reference frame, or in any local reference frame (as one can then take the metric to be the tangent Minkowski space). In an extended, non-free-falling reference frame the speed of light will not be constant, but will depend on the metric. But this is not what people mean with variable speed of light, and the article is talking about this as if it's the same idea.

I don't really understand GR, though, so I don't want to edit the article myself. Tercer (talk) 12:00, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I concur. I am no expert, but I understand enough to see that misinterpretation by WP editors is resulting in nonsense here. I think in this context, we should be relying exclusively in reputable secondary sources that providing clear-cut interpretations; this suggests that much of this material should just be scrapped. —Quondum 16:33, 28 March 2021 (UTC)

I removed a lot of the obvious OR, but the overview of Einstein's POV should still be cited to secondary sources. Other sections have WP:UNDUE and WP:SYNTH tags that should be investigated. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 14:53, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

Thanks, it did get better. I'm just a bit disappointed because the subject of the speed of light in GR is actually quite interesting, and it would be great to have it explained properly. I can't make a GR expert magically appear, though, and I guess no information is better than disinformation. Tercer (talk) 16:14, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

It would make sense to have a nice explanation of how the speed of light behaves in GR. For example, in a local frame of reference (i.e. using local rulers and clocks), in GR the speed of light is always the same, but measured by a remote observer extrapolating their clocks and rulers to a remote position (e.g. to close to a gravitating body), light might appear to have a different speed. VSL in this context must be taken to mean a departure from what would be expected from GR rather than a naïve interpretation of a "constant speed of light". The quote from Weinberg in Variable speed of light § Subsequent proposals is a clear misunderstanding of this principle, since Weinberg is just elucidating GR. —Quondum 16:43, 29 March 2021 (UTC)

I did some cutting in the later sections, and I made an attempt to trim the OR. I think that getting into the historical details should wait until after we've gotten the standard textbook material right. It's not our job to glean nuances of meaning out of Einstein's correspondence. Language like This has become a prevailing opinion in science, but not in agreement with Einstein's unambiguous math definitely sounds like it's trying to push an agenda of some kind. XOR'easter (talk) 20:57, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

It definitely reads better now, with fewer red flags. Variable speed of light § Subsequent proposals might give the impression that the "proposals" might be theoretical (as in being mathematical models), but my impression from what I could access of the material, including Dicke's, is that much is rough empirical observation and presumed relationships with zero validation against a complete or consistent mathematical model of the physics and cosmology (along the lines of "if we assume that α remains constant along with a few other things, then ε₀ and μ₀ would change thusly ..."), and thus really cannot be classed as serious proposals, more speculations used to prompt experiment to look for data. The article feels very thin. —Quondum 23:33, 30 March 2021 (UTC)

(←) I am struck by conceptual confusion that arises through the way language is used, with particular reference to distinct concepts that have the same name not being distinguished. For example, at Variable speed of light, no clear distinction is made between the speed at which a photon propagates and the limiting velocity c in SR, whereas in this context it would be important to distinguish them: the former has no relevance in the context. This kind of thing is probably pervasive, so I suppose there is not much to be done but to keep an eye out for it. —Quondum 12:17, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Event symmetry

Found via the miscellany in the "see also" for quantum gravity, and PROD'ed for non-notability and synthesis concerns. Sourced to the International Journal of Theoretical Physics, about which I've had concerns before. They don't seem to have much of a filter, for sure, having given space to Tipler's Omega Point [1] and more recently to El Naschie and acolytes [2][3], including some golden-ratio hype that seems to reinvent the idea of exponential decay before magically turning it linear instead [4]. XOR'easter (talk) 20:57, 20 March 2021 (UTC)

The PROD was removed by the article's creator (see Talk:Event symmetry). XOR'easter (talk) 16:19, 26 March 2021 (UTC)

Given that the article creator is an active WP editor, and has worked on at least a few other math and physics articles, and that editor appears mathematically literate, then it seems plausible to defer judgement to the creator. This is not the usual single-issue editor working on self-promotion. (The article itself, though, ugh...) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 20:02, 27 March 2021 (UTC)

Revisiting it, I think it's beyond salvaging; the notability case just isn't there. XOR'easter (talk) 04:31, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

I have just read through the article, and noticed immediately that the first reference is the only one that deals directly with the topic. The whole article is an essay motivating a principle to build a line of investigation, and the remaining references appear to be there to bolster plausibility of some points being made, giving the article a flavour of "developing a thesis on WP", or what I would call a "naughtary source" (to coin a term): it is essentially what would be a primary source if it were used as a source, but it is in WP itself. This also fits the picture that the only source that even seems to deal with the topic is apparently authored by the primary editor. I have to agree with XOR'easter: the article solidly fails pretty much every WP:GNG criterion, aside from effectively violating WP:NOR and WP:NOTESSAY. While investigations on topics of this nature are scientifically valuable (in this case what seems to be related to gauge theory but fails to mention this), and where properly developed and written deserve publication to stimulate critical thought, I would say that this is an extreme case of WP:TOOSOON for inclusion in Wikipedia. —Quondum 13:21, 31 March 2021 (UTC)

(←) I've just left a comment on the article's talk page. I think this one is a strong candidate for WP:AfD. —Quondum 00:07, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

White–Juday warp-field interferometer

I've tagged White–Juday warp-field interferometer just now for some evident issues. At the moment, I'm not convinced it's independently notable. XOR'easter (talk) 23:03, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

See also Warp-field experiments. XOR'easter (talk) 23:20, 1 April 2021 (UTC)

They and their See alsos look like a compendium of junk science. I hope that I am wrong. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:31, 1 April 2021 (UTC).

Similar to reactionless drives. We really should have a place outside of WP where we can offload material that is based on pure speculation. —Quondum 00:24, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

I hate to say it, but we probably need a concerted effort to clean up fringe physics on Wikipedia. There's far too much, and the source quality is far too low. So many pages could be trimmed, merged or deleted outright. Media coverage of reactionless space drives and such is almost completely credulous, and so it is very easy for fans of junk science to give these articles more footnotes than they deserve. XOR'easter (talk) 15:33, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

I can implement some things via WP:CITEWATCH and WP:UPSD, but if you know known fringe/quack sources, we could easily built a physics-oriented repository of such nonsense and quickly search for them across Wikipedia. As for "far too much", there is some fringe, but across 15,000+ physics articles, it's all in all pretty rare to find it. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:44, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

Irrespective of whether it is small in proportion, IMO junk science fandom on WP presents a serious problem when it saps the energy of editors who understand the goal of an encyclopaedia. Without a robust mechanism for dealing with the editors who fight to include it, it slows the building of WP. As yet, we simply do not have an efficient way of dealing with this. —Quondum 16:09, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

I have to say, you guys are doing a great job of clearing out all the fringe physics clutter that has accumulated over the years. Hemiauchenia (talk) 20:36, 2 April 2021 (UTC)

I think the fundamental problem is that the people who are interested in editing these articles are those who think the quack theory has some value, which results in credulous coverage in Wikipedia. When the theory is not notable, great, we can just delete the article, but when it is picked up by the pop-science press it becomes rather difficult, as the theory is then notable, and there are sources repeating their ridiculous claims. We should make a list of these articles here in WikiProject Physics to facilitate some coordinated action. Some articles that came to my attention, and I think can't be just deleted, are Quantized inertia, An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything, and Orchestrated objective reduction. Tercer (talk) 11:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

On a second thought, we can just add them to Category:Fringe physics, it fits the purpose very well. Tercer (talk) 13:12, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Yikes, orchestrated objective reduction is bad. It didn't just cite NeuroQuantology, it cited Deepak Chopra. XOR'easter (talk) 16:42, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I've taken initial steps at cleaning up the Orch-OR page, as well as Quantized inertia and An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything. Further attention would be helpful for all of them, I think. XOR'easter (talk) 22:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I've re-removed some fringe content that an anonymous IP re-added to quantized inertia. Additional eyes over there would be beneficial. XOR'easter (talk) 15:21, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Nicolas Gisin

Anyone feel like editing Nicolas Gisin for proper encyclopedic tone? It was created by a single-purpose account and reads like an advertisement for someone whose achievements can stand on their own. XOR'easter (talk) 15:49, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Oh, that's sad. Nicolas Gisin is actually a great researcher. From the North Korean tone of this article I would assume the opposite. He does have a very high opinion of himself, but not high enough to write that. Perhaps high enough to pay someone to write an article about him. Tercer (talk) 19:31, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Naming a proposed category

I propose to create a collection of subatomic particle categories sorting by some of their basic properties, such as refining Category:Bosons and Category:Fermions by spin. The first of these categories, concerning spin-0 particles, is drafted in this AfC/R request, but I had trouble picking a name for it. Should we describe it as "scalar and pseudoscalar bosons" or "particles with spin 0"? Categories for spin 1 and spin 2 would be affected as well; they are usually called (pseudo)vector and (pseudo)tensor bosons, respectively. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 04:14, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I would name it in terms of the spin property. It does not make sense to me for its name to be a list of its subcategories; it should be named by the property that groups them. And as someone who is not familiar with the finer distinctions of particles, "spin-0" is something I can relate to but "pseudo-scalar" is an unknown. I would also avoid "pseudo-", "quasi-", "semi-", etc. in category naming where possible because of the inherent vagueness of a prefix that just means "almost but not quite". —Quondum 11:50, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I wouldn't say pseudo-scalar is unknown, it's quite a widespread term. But it is a specialist term, and spin-0 is much clearer. Spin-0 at least has a chance of being understood by 3rd year physics students, whereas pseudoscalar only has a hope of being understood by those with an MSc in particle physics or more. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:39, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Sorry, I meant '"spin-0" is something I can relate to but "pseudo-scalar" is an unknown to me.' I also do not mean that I have not heard of it, only that I have effectively no understanding of what it means. So we are saying the much same thing. It sounds like we can infer an answer to the original question from this. —Quondum 22:10, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

The end of the EmDrive?

I just found this Popular Mechanics article that cites a number of research articles that effectively kill the EmDrive. The Second Law still stands! Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 14:26, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, the thing was dead on arrival IMO. The silly bit is how far it ever got when it was clearly impossible for it to work. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:30, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

It's not as if the EmDrive proponents ever cared about reality. I'm sure they'll continue peddling their nonsense undisturbed by the latest failure. Tercer (talk) 14:54, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

This also impinges upon quantized inertia. XOR'easter (talk) 15:46, 10 April 2021 (UTC)

Extra articles on extra dimensions?

While poking around in categories that seemed like they might contain fringey material, I noticed that we have the following three separate pages:

• Extra dimensions
• Large extra dimensions
• Universal extra dimensions

Is splitting this topic up in this way the best way to explain it? XOR'easter (talk) 21:07, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

It seems reasonable to me. Extra dimensions is a sort of list article, and the others are each a stand-alone theory or approach that shares the idea of "a spacetime of more than four dimensions", but is mutually disjoint. I'm not sure how else one would do it. —Quondum 21:24, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Clearly we need to create Small extra dimensions to complete the set. But seriously speaking, Universal extra dimensions should be merged into Large extra dimensions, it is also about large extra dimensions and explicitly refers to the ADD model. Extra dimensions is very different. Tercer (talk) 21:30, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

I understood Universal extra dimensions to be compactified dimensions, just not at the Planck scale, so they would not be large extra dimensions. Horrible name, though. —Quondum 21:56, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Both "large" and "universal" extra dimensions are compactified at some scale that is absolutely enormous compared to the Planck length. The crucial difference is that the "large" dimensions are supposed to be accessible only to gravity, but the "universal" dimensions to all fields. Tercer (talk) 07:44, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I had not read far enough into the Large extra dimensions article. Nevertheless, I don't think that a characteristic of a set of theories (compactified addition dimensions much larger that the Planck length, in this case) should have an article devoted to it, even if it is a summary of several such theories. "Large extra dimensions" is just a bad name for an article in WP; this should be renamed to something like "ADD model" or "LED model". Similarly, "Universal extra dimensions" is a bad name, and it would be nice if we could rename it to something more appropriate. —Quondum 17:03, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Ok, renaming it to ADD model makes it explicit that refers only to this model, as opposed to the concept of large extra dimensions in general. We can't do that for "Universal extra dimensions", though, as this is literally how the specific model is called. In any case, I'm not going to rename or move anything, this is outside my area of expertise and interest. Tercer (talk) 19:28, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

Maybe we can punt this back to XOR'easter; I feel hopelessly underqualified. Perhaps Universal extra dimensions (model)? —Quondum 22:26, 9 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't have strong opinions about this, just the sense that I've heard "large extra dimensions" used more loosely than this set of articles would imply; e.g., "universal extra dimension" models would also be called "large". Theories where the Standard Model fields propagate in large extradimensions may lead to testable predictions for the direct observation of new particles ... for a particular class of models, where all the SM fields propagate in extra dimensions [2], the precision constraints are relatively weak. Such universal extra dimensions (UED) models ... [5]. XOR'easter (talk) 14:49, 11 April 2021 (UTC)

Coverage of solid-state physics

Hey all, been perusing a number of pages related to solid state chemistry/condensed matter physics and finding a number of issues. Curious if there's a taskforce or anything specifically dedicated to these pages. Thanks! -- 2ReinreB2 (talk) 16:15, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

The taskforces have been dead for years, we should delete those pages. Your best bet is just to post the issues you find here. Tercer (talk) 19:11, 12 April 2021 (UTC)

AfD about passive integrator circuits

If anyone here knows where to look for sources about integrator circuits, your help at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Passive integrator circuit would be appreciated! — MarkH₂₁^talk 05:36, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Mechanothermodynamics again

As we're in the mood for spring cleaning, I have AfD'ed Mechanothermodynamics and its relatives, that we discussed before. Tercer (talk) 14:10, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

For the record, the AfD was closed as delete. XOR'easter (talk) 16:41, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

Gauging notability of particle physicists based on citations

Hi, there's a discussion (started here, in a completely unrelated AfD) where I bring up the difficulties I have evaluating a physicist's renown when they're extremely highly-cited but all or most of their citations come from enormous consortia/collaborations with hundreds of authors, especially when the publications are either periodical reviews or are things like form factor measurements with slightly better (e.g.) Q2 ranges than the last published measurement. Can a long-term accelerator tech be an author on dozens of these papers, or is multiple authorship an indication someone is a very influential senior researcher? JoelleJay (talk) 01:15, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Forget citation counts for particle physicists. The collaborations put everyone on the author list of every paper. Random PhD students in big collaborations can finish their PhD with over 10,000 citations. The slower they are the more citations they accumulate from the hundreds of papers the collaboration writes during their PhD. You cannot judge notability from citations, you need other metrics. Accelerator physics is a different field where groups are much smaller. --mfb (talk) 02:06, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

The assessment of the citation record of people in large research groups has always been a problem. My own criterion is to look for publications with a single or few number of authors. If these don't exist then independence of work is not established. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:14, 16 April 2021 (UTC).

That doesn't work either. Leading scientists in these collaborations will still publish with their name somewhere on page 5 of the author list, with the place purely determined by the alphabetical sorting. Sure, they will also have some conference notes and other things that might be single-authored, but that's not what leads to their notability. Look for important positions within the collaboration and press coverage of the scientists (instead of the overall collaboration). As an example, we can generally assume the spokesperson of a big collaboration to be notable. --mfb (talk) 02:22, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

The latter is not always the case. Public relations interface jobs are often given to bright neophyte researchers to give them administrative experience and leave the big shots free to get on with their work uninterrupted. Xxanthippe (talk) 02:36, 16 April 2021 (UTC).

Spokesperson of a collaboration is not a "public relations interface job". --mfb (talk) 09:48, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you mfb and Xxanthippe, that's definitely what I suspected. It's very difficult to make this argument in AfDs, though. Do you have any ideas for other metrics (outside of like named professorships and other criteria that meet WP:NPROF C2–8) that might be better indicators of notability? JoelleJay (talk) 05:05, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Notability has to be proven, and if there is no evidence of independent achievement I would say that notability is not present. Xxanthippe (talk) 05:11, 16 April 2021 (UTC).

There have always been around proposals to weigh publications and citations by their number of authors. For example, if a paper has 4 authors and 40 citations then each author could be attributed 1/4 of a paper and 10 citations. This might make comparison between authors in large and small groups easier. The owners of the citation data bases have this information but they do not release it. It is too laborious for the average editor (perhaps not yourself) to do the calculations. Xxanthippe (talk) 07:19, 16 April 2021 (UTC).

Still comes with the same problem. That's just counting length of membership in the collaboration. Someone who just tags along for 10 years ends up with the same number as someone who develops a new revolutionary analysis method every year in the same time frame. --mfb (talk) 09:52, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Exactly. That's why one wants to see independent achievement demonstrated. Xxanthippe (talk) 11:36, 16 April 2021 (UTC).

In my ideal world of intractably-complicated spreadsheet-based notability assessment we would have a weighted citation distribution as a function of author position (when ordinality applies) and coauthor number in these situations. Something like alphabetized (non-ordered) authors receiving the total number of citations divided by the square root of the number of alphabetized coauthors (let's call this value T); and ordered authors receiving between 100% and a bit over 50% of the citations based on position, subtracted by T: Q = # citations, R = # authors, S = # ordered authors, and P = ordered authorship position (0-indexed). $(Q-(((Q-(Q/2))/S)*P))-(Q/{\sqrt {R-S}})$. So for a paper with 5000 citations, 500 authors, and 10 ordered authors, the non-ordered authors would each receive 225.877, the first ordered author 4774.123, and the last ordered author 2524.123 citations. JoelleJay (talk) 21:36, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that a mathematical algorithm to assess WP:Prof#C1 without further input is impractical. Any user may propose algorithms, and many have. It needs an experienced editor to assess how much weight should be attached to the numbers they produce. As in any area of Wikipedia, knowledge of the individual field and judgement leads to the best edits. In addition, I think that the order of authors on a paper cannot be used to determine notability because the usage varies so widely. Xxanthippe (talk) 00:16, 18 April 2021 (UTC).

Of course, this was just a farcical suggestion I devised in 10 minutes after seeing your comment on weighting by author number and wondering "how could I make that more complicated and laborious?" JoelleJay (talk) 06:41, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Perhaps one of these would have made your import clearer. Xxanthippe (talk) 06:52, 19 April 2021 (UTC).

Cleaning Category:Physics articles needing expert attention

I have followed the recent discussion about the Template:Expert needed. The result was that "moving forward, uses with a reason parameter should be kept, and uses with no reason given should either be given one or removed". I checked our Category:Physics articles needing expert attention and only a few articles use the reason parameter. It would be nice if physics editors have a look at the list. I have the feeling that some alerts were added because of OR/fringe research. --SimoneD89 (talk) 07:29, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad this was the result of the discussion, this template drives me mad. I removed it from a few of the articles in the category. Tercer (talk) 13:06, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you very much for your work. I'm trying to understand the reason parameter from the edit comments or from the talk page. I'm removing the template when the article widely changed respect to the date-parameter version. There are many unsourced articles, dictionary lemmas, ... It would be great for the project when the category entries will drop to O(10). --SimoneD89 (talk) 13:18, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I found Metafluid dynamics, where every sentence is disputed. I don't know how to deal with it. Moreover, I PRODed Magnahelic gauge. Is speedy deletion more appropriate in this fuzzy case? What about Anchor Force Equation (proof). Do we have/need proof articles? --SimoneD89 (talk) 14:40, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

I PROD'ed metafluid dynamics. Looking at the history of magnahelic gauge, I suppose it might escape speedy deletion criterion G11 on a technicality; what you did is probably fine. as for Anchor Force Equation (proof), that seems to be an analysis of a simple textbook problem in Newtonian mechanics. I'd say it violates WP:NOTTEXTBOOK. XOR'easter (talk) 15:35, 3 April 2021 (UTC)

(←) Here we are again. I found two suspicious articles and I would like to know your opinion before PROD'ing them. The first is Vector model of the atom. It doesn't look very notable according to google scholar. It looks like random content about angular momenta. The second article is Transition of state. Do we need it? Everything is unsourced and it is a textbook exposition of the transition probability of one specific potential. The last is Mode of a linear field, I directly PROD'ed it. --SimoneD89 (talk) 06:52, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Vector model of the atom is rather strange; this is not an atomic model, but a vanilla description of angular momentum in quantum mechanics. Apart from the title I don't see anything wrong with the article, but the same material is covered in angular momentum operator and angular momentum coupling. As for transition of state I PRODed it as WP:NOTTEXTBOOK. Tercer (talk) 09:59, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I found the name vector model only in [Littlefield, Thorley, 1979]. it doesn't seem to be notable enough for a redirect to Angular momentum coupling (in the section LS coupling there are the same pictures where the "vector nature" is manifest). If there are no objections, I will propose it for deletion because of non-notability of the name. --SimoneD89 (talk) 11:03, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Agreed: deletion makes more sense than a redirect. Especially since "vector model of the atom" and "vector model" are phrases that naturally could mean any number of things, depending on context. In particular, the former could more naturally mean a geometric model (a positional vector description) rather than relating to angular momentum. —Quondum 11:49, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. Does anyone have a particularly nice reference that could go into Induced metric? The reason for the tag is technically untrue (there exists one reference rather than zero), but an additional pointer to a good introduction couldn't hurt. XOR'easter (talk) 15:47, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I think Induced metric is a candidate for a (possible merge and) redirect to say Embedding#Riemannian and pseudo-Riemannian geometry. It has the feel of being a section rather than a stand-alone article. —Quondum 16:13, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

(←) (forgetting about subcategories) 150 entries left :) --SimoneD89 (talk) 17:46, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

I've tried to fix up a few. Others might be candidates for merging, redirection or deletion (see the discussion of Event symmetry above). I've noticed that some of them were tagged for being "too technical". Some of these were possibly tagged in passing, without too much careful consideration of whether it's actually possible to say meaningful but non-technical things about topics that physics students might not see until a year or more into graduate school. XOR'easter (talk) 19:44, 4 April 2021 (UTC)

Subcategories are now empty and letters A-D have a reason stated. Letter E is more problematic. We have Energy rate density which is very context-dependent and the name is already a definition. Do we need it? Moreover the author has a COI issue because of the article in the see also section (check the see also article. Moreover that name also appears in the references...). The article Enhancement or quenching of QD, Q-wire and QW radiations was already PROD'ed because of OR and survived a deletion discussion. The article didn't improve in the meantime... In Event symmetry there is an ongoing discussion. There is a COI-issue (see history of his user page, he is the author of the first reference). Moreover viXra is mentioned in his user page. Therefore extra care and more eyes are needed. Last, we have Exact solutions in general relativity. The article is written with unencyclopedic language and most of the content looks OR and it is not referenced. The main contributor retired in 2006 and the article remained unchanged. It also requires extra efforts to read the talk page where there are useless politics comments about wikipedia (from the main contributor). --SimoneD89 (talk) 12:10, 5 April 2021 (UTC) Bonus: I found a 2009 troll article about a non-existing person, i.e. Baien Tomlin. External links are very creative. Speedy deletion requested. --SimoneD89 (talk) 13:29, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

"Energy rate density" sounds like a term invented by someone who has little feel for terminology: it literally means "power density" (SI unit: W/m³), which is not what the article is about. It would ordinarily be called "specific (or massic) power" (SI unit: W/kg). The article has some examples that are not included in the nearly equivalent term "Power-to-weight ratio" article, which has a less scientific (or more restricted) use. I suggest redirecting Energy rate density to Power density, possibly after moving the article to Specific power (replacing the DAB there). It is essentially a rather focused stub that could be sensibly expanded to many other contexts. —Quondum 14:31, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd suggest taking both Event symmetry and Enhancement or quenching of QD, Q-wire and QW radiations to AfD. The discussion of the former (both here and at its talk page) found no indication of notability and much indication of unsalvagability. The previous AfD for the latter was in 2009 and ended with a "no consensus". It seems high time to revisit that. Exact solutions in general relativity needs a trimming for tone here and there, but I think it's a decent fixer-upper. XOR'easter (talk) 15:57, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Agree with merging Energy rate density to Power density as a duplicate, and maybe merging Induced metric with Submanifold as it is too short to stand on its own. I've nominated the former for a merge to an undetermined title. After doing an overview of Event symmetry, I now agree that this is WP:SYNTH and have brought the article to AfD at Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Event symmetry.

Although the topic of Helium line ratio is notable, the article barely explains what its topic is — in other words, it is a borderline A1 as it stands — and the article has remained almost unchanged since creation in 2005. Also note that Beta decay transition is incorrectly indexed under G. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 18:37, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Helium line ratio has been turned into a redirect. —Quondum 22:12, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

...by me. I would have merged it, but I couldn't find anything there worth merging.--Srleffler (talk) 22:16, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Looks good. I added references, in case anyone is interested in expanding on the specific technique of using helium. —Quondum 22:27, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

I fixed the incorrect indexing of Beta decay transition as well.--Srleffler (talk) 22:28, 5 April 2021 (UTC)

Thermodynamics of the universe is ... well, I'm not sure what it is. It starts with an equation that could potentially be interpreted to mean something, but definitely not in the way that any student is taught thermodynamics (PdV tells you the work done by the system on the outside, but what's "outside" the universe?). Then it says In fact this is a wrong derivation ... so what was the point of including it? Even if cleaned up, the article would probably be redundant with Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker metric. XOR'easter (talk) 04:01, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

The editor that wrote most of the article is still active. @Dan Gluck: can you do something about it? As I see the main problem is that the article is completely unsourced; I can't even tell whether it is WP:OR or standard material. Tercer (talk) 10:56, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

I think there is an issue also with the name. Is it an established term? In google scholar it appears to be not common in the literature (few results with few citations). Info: I removed the physics wikiproject from the eyeglasses brochure Anti-scratch coating (ex expert-needed article). --SimoneD89 (talk) 11:10, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

Thermodynamics of the universe has the character of personal notes that someone stored in WP: it is unsourced, and it essentially only gives the most broad-strokes overview of what forms of energy might dominate the universe at various times. It seems to be the wrong name for this, and I would guess that it is normally just treated as an aspect of cosmology. Just deleting it may be most appropriate. Physical cosmology contains the sentence Thermodynamics of the universe is a field of study that explores which form of energy dominates the cosmos; I am dubious that this would be regarded as a field of study in its own right, even disregarding the misnomer. —Quondum 12:12, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

While people definitely do apply thermodynamic concepts to the universe as a whole (Big Freeze comes to mind), "thermodynamics of the universe" is an odd turn of phrase, at least to my ear. And calling the breakdown of the cosmic energy density into components (so much dark energy, so much dark matter, a few percent baryonic matter, etc.) a part of "thermodynamics" likewise sounds unusual. XOR'easter (talk) 16:07, 6 April 2021 (UTC)

PRODded. As written, it violates WP:NOTTEXTBOOK and does not describe thermodynamics at all.

I think a lot of these expert needed tags can be replaced by more specific tags; for example, the tag on NPDGamma experiment should be replaced by {{too technical}} + {{update}}. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 08:21, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

Hi! Regarding the Thermodynamics of the universe article - yes I used very poor terminology in that article, ending up saying plainly wrong things. I do vaguely remember there was a formalism where there was some solid meaning to all this, but I can't stand behind that currently. The rate of expansion part, which is a sensible part there and one of the reasons why I wrote this article in the first place, has already been rewritten in better ways in other articles such as Friedmann equations. So, I support deletion.Dan Gluck (talk) 21:13, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

I replaced the {{expert needed}} template when there were no major issues + other templates were more appropriate. In some {{expert needed}}, the template was (implicitly) added to ask the WikiProject attention to consider the deletion. For example in the case of the NPDGamma experiment. Is it notable? Google scholar is giving me only 360 results and all of them have few citations. The second article in the references (the first one doesn't speak about the experiment) has 2 citations. Moreover, the page (except for minor fixing) is abandoned since its creation in 2009. At some point, we should also comment on our feeling about {{expert needed}}. I think that for STEM-related topics, people often used it like a "PROD-needed" template. --SimoneD89 (talk) 09:05, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

NPDGamma experiment seems legit; first result I get is a PRL from 2018 reporting the results of the experiment, with 15 citations [6]. The article should be updated, not deleted. Tercer (talk) 09:38, 7 April 2021 (UTC)

• Mass in general relativity is horrible. I just removed over 10 KB of WP:NOTFAQ-violating content with WP:OR concerns from 2016. It is missing key information, and the expert tag has correspondingly been replaced with {{missing information}}. The article is lacking in inline citations. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:08, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
• What are your thoughts on Global symmetry? Should the article be merged with Local symmetry or with another article, as claimed by the expert needed tag? Other concern is redundant with {{physics-stub}}. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:23, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • Both Global symmetry and Local symmetry are largely abandoned and content-free. I'd redirect them both to Symmetry (physics), which is in a better state. It's a shame, as the topic is unquestionably notable, but if nobody wants to write the articles what can we do? Tercer (talk) 11:10, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • I think it makes sense to turn both Global symmetry and Local symmetry into redirects to Symmetry (physics) as suggested by Tercer. Only once those sections in Symmetry (physics) have expanded to warrant separate articles should these be split out. (Aside: it would be nice if it was clearly stated that a global symmetry is also a local symmetry, which I infer from the description.) —Quondum 12:43, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
    • I've redirected both global symmetry and local symmetry to symmetry (physics). XOR'easter (talk) 16:38, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
• Quantum energy teleportation. Tagged for: Quantum energy teleportation is not an established concept in physics. It all hinges on few papers that have not even gained significant attention in the expert community. Without major scientific breakthroughs on the topic, this may not be notable for an article. Expert needed tag removed as redundant to existing {{notability}} tag. The article has few secondary sources and an OR concern. The page creator and main contributor Qbit-qbit (talk · contribs) has made zero edits outside of this article, and there is one additional SPA Quantum treker (talk · contribs) who may be a sock puppet. The, but two editors on the talk seem to agree that this fails WP:GNG. Pinging those users, @Geek3 and RobinK, for further comment. What is the notability threshold for GScholar citations in this field, and why didn't you just take the article straight to AfD? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:47, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • I don't think there's an exact numerical cutoff for GS citations that infallibly determines notability. However, sifting through the citations to the original paper turns up only a handful that are both peer-reviewed and not by the original author. Meanwhile, quantum teleportation articles can rack up thousands of citations [7]. I'm very dubious that quantum energy teleportation can stand on its own feet. XOR'easter (talk) 03:30, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • The article has still not improved, and nothing has really changed during the ten years of its existence. I vote for deletion. --Geek3 (talk) 08:04, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • The number of citations an article has gives us a good idea of how influential an idea is, but it is not a criterion for Wikipedia, the criterion is coverage in multiple independent reliable sources. I searched a lot, but I could find a single one [8]. That doesn't cut it. I've also read the paper, and oh boy, it's impressive how they managed to express such a simple idea in such complicated terms. The idea is that you have an entangled state ${\frac {1}{\sqrt {2}}}(|00\rangle +|11\rangle )$, and you make a measurement in the first subsystem in the $\{|+\rangle ,|-\rangle \}$ basis, which collapses the second subsystem to $|+\rangle$ or $|-\rangle$. Now with the measurement result you apply a phase to correct the second subsystem such that it is always in the state $|+\rangle$ (this conserves energy, as you can take the local Hamiltonian to be $|1\rangle \langle 1|$, which commutes with the phase correction). Now you can extract the energy by applying a Hadamard gate to the second subsystem, taking it to the ground state. Without the measurement the second subsystem was in the maximally mixed state, so that would be impossible. It's kind of an entangled Szilard engine, not really related to teleportation. Tercer (talk) 09:48, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
  • I'd say it fails WP:GNG: the only citations in the article that deal with the topic are by a single author, primary sources and nowhere in a peer-reviewed journal; the others seem to relate to quantum teleportation (which is not the same topic). Notwithstanding XOR'easter's more thorough check that turns up a few citations from elsewhere, combined with a few other red flags (like SPA editors) I think this article should be deleted. —Quondum 13:06, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
    • The paper linked by Tercer was the only adequate source (in-depth, secondary, etc.) that I could find. Accordingly, I've PROD'ed the article. XOR'easter (talk) 16:44, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
      • I would have classified [9] as a primary source, just by different authors. Not that it matters. (Also, I can't help thinking that local energy conservation must be a theorem: the receiving apparatus must exactly preserve energy irrespective of the content of a random data stream, not in the ensemble, but for each possible data stream – even if the second law of thermodynamics might be violated. But this is getting into debating the physics of something I know next to nothing about.) —Quondum 18:03, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
        • Of course energy is locally conserved, this is not teleportation. It's about using information to make the energy extractable, like in the Szilard engine. Tercer (talk) 18:40, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
          • In that case, it is a clear misnomer, since it is about entropy (or perhaps free energy), not energy in the classical sense. The idea of transporting information (negentropy I guess) through a classical channel is hardly interesting, even if it might be used in the context of quantum state teleportation and to embody something like Maxwell's demon. If it were described by the authors as such, it may be more credible. —Quondum 19:01, 8 April 2021 (UTC)
            • Yeah, it's nothing revolutionary, but I think if the authors had described it as a quantum information protocol it wouldn't have been mostly ignored, as it was. They insisted on talking about specific Hamiltonians and ground states and temperatures, which are beside the point. Tercer (talk) 21:16, 8 April 2021 (UTC)

Results

I would like to thank all the people who helped clean up the expert-needed category. Special thanks go to Tercer and XOR'easter for their extra effort and great accurate work. I took some numbers to motivate and encourage other WikiProjects to check their needing-attention categories.

Spring cleaning in numbers: on April 3, 2021, we had in total 245 articles in the expert-needed category (+ subcategories). Today, there are only 49 articles and all of them have a reason parameter. We had 15 articles PROD'ed, 3 articles AfD'ed, and 3 articles speedy deleted. In conclusion: 19 articles were deleted, 16 articles were transformed into redirects, and 1 article was widely expanded.

--SimoneD89 (talk) 18:30, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm glad you appreciate it. Thanks for taking the initiative of doing the spring cleaning. Most importantly, the remaining uses of the expert-needed are almost all legitimate, so if the mythical expert shows up they'll see work that actually needs them.

There's still a bit of nonsense left: Enhancement or quenching of QD, Q-wire and QW radiations and Udwadia–Kalaba equation should just be AfD'ed, but frankly I lack the energy. Tercer (talk) 20:12, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I made the numbers slightly worse just now by adding {{expert needed}} to Quantum vacuum thruster. My own inclination would be to chop out vast blocks of it, but I too am tired, and perhaps someone else would like to try first. XOR'easter (talk) 22:22, 15 April 2021 (UTC)

I don't think that Quantum vacuum thruster is salvageable. Any article about it would define what it is; all this does is collect related statements about it without really defining what it is. Until a stub can be created (ideally from a source that defines it clearly), AfD might be appropriate. "Something that purports to use MHD-like principles but on the vacuum" does not cut it even in a stub. Maybe redirect to Reactionless drive and expand to one sentence there? —Quondum 00:38, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

QVT also has copyvio issues. For example, it lifts sentences from https://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/nets2012/pdf/3082.pdf with minor modification for the lead. —Quondum 00:48, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd have no objection to making it a redirect or to taking it to AfD. XOR'easter (talk) 14:47, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

While looking at fringe propulsion methods, I found this: Woodward effect. I almost started cleaning it up, then realized that I would need to blank essentially the entire article, it's written from the fringe point of view. Tercer (talk) 18:01, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Woodward also gave a video interview for the TV show Ancient Aliens, season 7, episode 1. Well, that's one way to make yourself look respectable. XOR'easter (talk) 18:42, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

That's hilarious. Tercer (talk) 19:30, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I'd go so far as to say that every citation in Woodward effect is either unreliable or background material (e.g., Mach's principle or Wheeler–Feynman absorber theory) that doesn't count toward its notability. I've redirected quantum vacuum thruster to reactionless drive. XOR'easter (talk) 19:27, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Very likely. Establishing it is a lot of work, though. I also found Abraham–Minkowski controversy, which apparently also leads to a reactionless drive somehow. In that case there was really nothing to salvage, I applied WP:TNT myself. Tercer (talk) 19:30, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

Thank you, Tercer. I was just looking at Abraham–Minkowski controversy and thinking that needed a rewrite from a historical perspective, but wasn't as bold. It would be just weird if that was seriously still up in the air; a while back I even showed that one could unambiguously calculate forces at boundaries etc. so there could be no theoretical issues (unless you are confused about how bound charge behaves). I bet it is one of those simple ones that is just too obvious for anyone to seriously write anything about. Yet the article gave the impression that it was still a raging debate. —Quondum 21:04, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

It's my pleasure. The weird thing is, the debate was somehow open until recently, there's a 2010 PRL settling it [10]. I was faintly aware of the controversy because a friend of mine did his Master's thesis on it. It is indeed a subtle issue how you define momentum in dielectrics. Now the raging debate in the article was written by Smithwikilover and Highmountain81 (clearly socks), which were just reporting on how unpublished preprints by Wang disagreed with everyone. I was unsure whether to WP:TNT the article or restore it to this version [11], from before they started damaging it. But it is from 2013, so there wouldn't be much left in any case. Perhaps I should do it anyway, the text there is more clear. Do you have an opinion? Tercer (talk) 21:21, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I would be happier with it as it is now – it has several references for those who want to dig, and the older version seems to give more airtime to what I think is too perspective-based (it does not have a suitable arms-length tone). I do not find the older version any clearer, even though it is more expository. I can't help thinking that "the debate" that was "open until recently" is just non-notable types publishing; that anyone with a solid grasp of Maxwell's equations would see how to analyze it and not find it interesting enough. The rigorous simple analysis approach seems to be just missing from the "debate". —Quondum 22:34, 16 April 2021 (UTC)

I would like to request Tercer to restore the article to the version before you made any deletions. From your words, I do believe that you clearly know which journals have higher impact factors, and which textbooks are more respected. Based on this, you judge what articles are of high quality and what results are reliable. I have to admit, usually this is a safe rule. I also often use this rule to judge the quality of research works out of my research field, because I am a layperson. Do you know how the Abraham tensor was artificially constructed? Do you know whether the Abraham tensor is Lorentz covariant? Why is the momentum-energy tensor required to be symmetrical in traditional textbooks? If you were not to know, I would say that you do not have enough ability to identify the literature in this field, and thus it is not appropriate for you to delete this professional article. You are free to add your views, but please don’t delete somebody else’s. I also would like to say that it is the conscience of scientists to expose the corruptions in academic circles, instead of “personal attack”. I know that you are expert in quantum mechanics. May I have a question for you: Is Dirac relativistic wave equation Lorentz covariant? Smithwikilover (talk) 17 April 2021 (UTC)

I do need to delete somebody else's point of view. The article was an impenetrable wall of text and an egregious violation of WP:DUE: it was written from the point of view of Wang, who is clearly in the minority. The sources used were unpublished pre-prints and a couple of articles in borderline journals that were hardly ever cited. Wikipedia is explicitly and unapologetically about presenting the mainstream point of view. It's true that I'm not an expert in this subject, but I can easily identify what is the mainstream point of view and what is not. And please, do refrain from this talk of "exposing corruption in academic circles", this reflects badly on you. Tercer (talk) 08:49, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Adding to what Tercer says, we need to give the reader a sense of what the topic is about and its history, not rehash the various arguments, nor give the impression that it is an unsolved problem in physics (I have just deleted it from there). The article should be rewritten from this perspective. —Quondum 13:31, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Moreover, we don't give viewpoints more prominence here than they have actually attained in the scientific community. XOR'easter (talk) 16:04, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Tercer, please note that this article title is “Abraham–Minkowski controversy”, which means that all different mainstream views should be presented to readers although every specific view is in the minority. So I presented all possible different views neutrally and fairly, including Wang’s view. Indeed, Wang’s view is taken mostly from low impact-factor scientific journals such as Canadian Journal of Physics, Optik, and Annalen der Physik, but they are indeed of mainstream scientific journals, and published by reliable sources. Thus Wang’s view is also a mainstream view. In addition, Arxiv reprints are never prohibited by WP:DUE from being cited. Therefore, the reason of your deletion is untenable. Smithwikilover (talk) 18 April 2021 (UTC)

That's emphatically not what WP:DUE says. Please read it. Let me quote: we should represent the views in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources. Giving due weight and avoiding giving undue weight means articles should not give minority views or aspects as much of or as detailed a description as more widely held views or widely supported aspects. Generally, the views of tiny minorities should not be included at all, except perhaps in a "see also" to an article about those specific views. We do not treat each published source equally. Tercer (talk) 17:18, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Tercer, I think that I presented “the views in proportion to the prominence of each viewpoint in the published, reliable sources” required by WP:DUE. Please note that the word “prominence” itself is very subjective, and laypersons and professional workers may have a complete different understanding for the same research work. To my knowledge, there is no any point of view in the Abraham-Minkowski controversy that is accepted by a majority of physicists, and in fact, every specific view is in the minority. Some papers may have more citations, but that does not mean that they have more “prominence”. This is just like laypersons usually use journal’s impact factors to measure the quality of research works; however, professional workers not. In my presentation, I usually make comparisons between different views so that readers can get a better understanding, and let readers judge which one has more “prominence”. Thus what I did is consistent with the rules in WP:DUE, and the reason of your deletion is untenable. Smithwikilover (talk) 18 April 2021 (UTC)

I've made some initial attempts at clearing out Woodward effect, but I can only look at it for so long before my eyes glaze over. It needs more drastic trimming than I've managed so far. I did a copyvio check and found some pretty egregious examples (though some of Earwig's matches were probably reverse copyvio). I'm skeptical that it is even independently notable. XOR'easter (talk) 18:30, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Thanks for doing that, but I don't think the article's problems can be solved by trimming, it is written from the fringe point of view. As for notability, I went through the sources in the article, and couldn't find much. There's this report [12], that doesn't seem peer reviewed, debunking Woodward's ideas. There's this peer-reviewed paper [13], that also debunks his theory, even under modified gravity. And there's these experimental papers [14] [15] [16] that try to measure the effect. They all seem credulous about the theory, but while the first two claim to have measured thrust, the third says it was only noise. I guess it's so obviously wrong that few think it's worth the effort to criticize. There is some coverage in the lay media, though, which might give it notability. Tercer (talk) 19:59, 17 April 2021 (UTC)

Can the whole thing just be redirected somewhere? If there's so little in the way of sourcing, then maybe all it needs is a paragraph somewhere else. XOR'easter (talk) 15:57, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

That looks to me to be the appropriate thing to do. James F. Woodward#Woodward effect seems like a candidate. Second-place possibilities include Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program and NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts#2018 NIAC Project Selections. Though the term "Woodward effect" itself does not seem to have notability; not even Woodward used it. —Quondum 17:24, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Redirected to the first option. XOR'easter (talk) 17:56, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Enhancement or quenching of QD, Q-wire and QW radiations has been AfD'd. For Udwadia–Kalaba equation, there are concerns about NPOV and lack of significance, including a letter quoted on the talk page which claims that it is a trivial rearrangenent of other ideas. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 03:52, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Ok, I have AfD'ed it. Tercer (talk) 11:36, 18 April 2021 (UTC)

Side discussion: "unresolved" debates in academia

Please feel free to shoo me away from here, as this is not really a discussion forum. I'm not sure where would be appropriate though. Tercer wrote above: "The weird thing is, the debate was somehow open until recently, there's a 2010 PRL settling it [17]. I was faintly aware of the controversy because a friend of mine did his Master's thesis on it. It is indeed a subtle issue how you define momentum in dielectrics." I have seen a phenomenon where one group treats some issue as unsolved while another evidently considers it an uninteresting special case of a solved general problem but remains nonvocal. Was this debate skewed in this way? In a sense this is pertinent to how we report academic debates on WP. —Quondum 14:16, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Well it is almost tautologically true that the people who think the problem is unsolved will keep writing papers about it, and those who think it is solved or uninteresting will work on other things. A couple of months ago I saw a paper on the arXiv about a debate that raged in the 60s: whether fundamental randomness was compatible with the classical block universe picture from relativity theory. I guess back then this made sense - from quantum mechanics we had fundamental randomness, but from a Copenhagen point of view spacetime was still somehow classical. Nowadays nobody takes the idea of a classical spacetime seriously anymore, and thus the debate became irrelevant, with only this single pre-print trying to continue it.

At the end of the day we have to look at what the textbook writers are saying. They are the ones who need to write about the problem, regardless of whether they think it's solved or not. This is why I the only thing I left in Abraham–Minkowski controversy about the argument itself after brutally culling it was Griffiths' point of view. Tercer (talk) 15:49, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

I totally agree with the culling – more than one source had a similar perspective to Griffiths, and I like what we ended up with.

I'm not sure that one can be confident in textbooks – an example (in GA) made me think otherwise. It is easy to notice the isolated individuals such as you mention, but sometimes there is nobody correcting stuff being put out there because it is not worth the bother, and it is difficult as an editor to discover whether the knowledge is there without being an expert oneself. The A–M case feels borderline in this sense, so for example, deeper digging might uncover that it was in a real sense resolved much earlier. Maybe my problem is that my access to sources is too limited. —Quondum 19:57, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, Griffiths does say that the problem was essentially solved in the 60s, and the recent papers were helpful in clarifying the issue.

What was the problem with Geometric Algebra? Of course nothing is a guarantee of correctness, but textbooks are the safest we have. I think a good example is proving Bell's theorem: there are literally dozens of proofs going around, several of them good, some of them by crackpots, but even the good ones often violently disagree with each other. The literature is a minefield. If you look at the standard textbook in quantum information, though (Mike & Ike), you'll find a proof that's very safe: it's not particularly enlightening or even up-to-date, but it is correct and very mainstream.

As for access to sources, since Sci-Hub opened I never had a difficulty again. Tercer (talk) 20:39, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

The GA thing: I derived a very nice general result (representing the action of GL(n) on a vector space in a GA), which I had not seen in any of the literature that I'd accessed (I'd overlooked it in my one textbook), but Dorst, Fontijne, Mann (2007) and Perwass (2009) lament the absence of projective transformations in a GA, and several papers were being published scratching away at special cases of the problem. Eventually I found that Doran had published the existence of versors for GL(n) acting on Rⁿ in 1993 (which then allows projective transformations Pⁿ⁻¹), and again in a textbook in 2003 and Sobczyk (2002) published it too (though none in a way that made its use simple as per my result). The point is that most of the GA community were saying that finding a GA representation was an unsolved problem, which was not true.

Thanks for that resource; I'm sure it will be very helpful. I can think of a few metrology papers that I want to read. —Quondum 22:23, 19 April 2021 (UTC)

That's very frustrating. Nothing so extreme happened to me, but several times I derived a result that was already known. The first time was when I was still a student, I had found a small but neat result on positive maps that are not completely positive. Alas, the Horodecki family had published it a couple of years before. The most frustrating time was when I wrote a paper about a result, and one of the referees rejected it saying the result was well-known, even though it wasn't published anywhere. Joke's on them, the paper got published anyway and is rather well-cited, apparently there was a lot of people that didn't already know it. Tercer (talk) 08:36, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Researching and publishing do not come naturally to me; I play with things much simpler than QM as a hobby. Finding that I have reinvented something known is a familiar feeling. In the GA example, discovering that what I had derived was known felt like a vindication; here it just serves as an example of how a known thing can be "unknown". —Quondum 14:22, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Unified mechanics theory

I proposed the deletion of the recently accepted article Unified mechanics theory because all the references were very recent (2019-21) and google scholar had few publications with few results and most of them from the same author. The article was deproded and expanded. Before proceeding with the nomination for AfD (since I never did it), I would like to hear some opinion. --SimoneD89 (talk) 10:29, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Please nominate it for AfD, this is howling-at-the-moon level of insanity. Tercer (talk) 11:04, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

AFD'ed. I hope I did everything right. --SimoneD89 (talk) 11:34, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Yep, everything correct. You can use WP:Twinkle to automate that drudgery. Also, keep in mind that PRODing newly created article is usually futile, as the creator will contest it. In these cases I go straight to AfD. Tercer (talk) 11:54, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Hoo boy, that AfD is a fun one. XOR'easter (talk) 20:07, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Dead as a doughnut. Lithopsian (talk) 20:10, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

Multiple overlapping SPA's, and an anonymous IP from the city where the inventor teaches.... XOR'easter (talk) 20:23, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

We are on the flat Earth and the DJ is scratching. Tercer (talk) 20:36, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I almost wish I had a LinkedIn account so I could look into that group they keep touting. (Almost.) And I wonder if there was some legitimate engineering/material-science thermodynamics originally, which they then ran off into the sunset with, making ever-more-grandiose claims about unification. But if they can't be bothered to explain themselves clearly, I'm not going to dig for possible respectability on their behalf. XOR'easter (talk) 20:44, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

I find it fascinating the idea that there are 4300 scientists discussing this insanity in LinkedIn. Perhaps it's better not to let this idea die by confronting it with reality. Tercer (talk) 21:45, 13 April 2021 (UTC)

• Slightly over 4300 LinkedIn accounts. Whether they are scientists, I couldn't tell you. LinkedIn being what it is, it's quite likely that a fair few of them are recruiters. ☺ If it helps, by the way, I found the Disturbed State Concept ahead of time, just in case.
  • Desai, Chandrakant S. (January 2015). "Constitutive modeling of materials and contacts using the disturbed state concept: Part 1 — Background and analysis". Computers & Structures. 146: 214–233. doi:10.1016/j.compstruc.2014.07.018.
  • Desai, Chandrakant S. (January 2015). "Constitutive modeling of materials and contacts using the disturbed state concept: Part 2 — Validations at specimen and boundary value problem levels". Computers & Structures. 146: 234–251. doi:10.1016/j.compstruc.2014.07.026.
• Uncle G (talk) 00:26, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

The main book of the theory was published 1-2 months ago, and the wiki article was created one week ago. I suspect these two events are correlated. I will keep an eye on the physics articles for creation because this article was speedy-accepted and the lack of notability was rather glaring. --SimoneD89 (talk) 06:10, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@SimoneD89 there is Draft:Generalized law of friction waiting in the wings for review. Fiddle Faddle 06:24, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Well, it was. It is declined for a technical sourcing reason, but it will be back. Looks suitable for MfD by someone who can create the reasoning. Drafts at MfD fare strangely. They tend to be given more leeway than is always desirable. Fiddle Faddle 06:29, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Do we have an article about editors-fatigue? All of these engineering articles have the same issues... few results in gs, not enough citations (I expect higher numbers in engineering science), and most by the same authors. Typically the state of art is also very unclear, therefore the same idea could be somewhere with different names. In any case, generalized law of friction is not an established terminology. It is also a very general and vague term. Googling generalized friction law will give different results in different fields... --SimoneD89 (talk) 07:13, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

What is it with the ASME these days? Brilliant senior engineers, after distinguished careers in engineering applications, decide that they have found some hitherto unknown unifying physical theory. The last time was the AfD for constructal law which resulted in a merge. Adrian Bejan received the Benjamin Franklin Medal in part for it but we don't have to have an article about it. Before you can say something IS a physical law you have to do some actual physics, not just argue from analogy. Now we have the work of Cemal Basaran, another ASME Fellow, arguing that since the equations used to model material fatigue can be written in a form that look something like Newton's laws of motion this reveals a new principle of nature. In both cases there are books, large numbers of papers, and large numbers of engineers as followers. StarryGrandma (talk) 10:35, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Physicists are famous for getting bored with run-off-the-mill research and going for speculative and grandiose theories when they get old. There's no reason engineers should be immune to this weakness. Tercer (talk) 11:47, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

It is sometimes only too obvious when someone is trying to think outside a straightjacket but fails to avoid entrenched preconceptions. I have observed this "I have something new" thinking at all ages; maybe established visibility skews the perception of the phenomenon. —Quondum 12:24, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

(←) Many times books are used as an argument to show notability. I think that it should be pointed out that the peer-review process for books is much weaker with respect to the peer-review process of respectable journals. Moreover, books tend to attract more random citations. Right now, we have two examples in the AfD-list where the authors published a book about their non-notable physical theory. --SimoneD89 (talk) 10:52, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

• But it doesn't. That's what requiring independent sources is all about. If only the creator is publishing the books, the papers, the talks, and whatnot, then it isn't an idea that has genuinely escaped its creator and become a part of the general corpus of human knowledge. Anyone arguing such a case does not correctly understand what notability is. It's slightly stronger than where the Wikipedia:no original research policy started out, which started out to combat the idea that people could use Wikipedia as effectively an zero-cost open access publication service. It's not only you haven't been through peer review and properly published; it's also even if you have been properly published, no-one else has adopted your idea. Uncle G (talk) 13:25, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Please see Wikipedia:Sockpuppet investigations/Barejsha02 which editors are welcome to contribute evidence to Fiddle Faddle 13:11, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I think you got things mixed up, there are two independent sock groups:

1. Barejsha02 and Bona85, that edit on Mechanothermodynamics-related articles.
2. Cemalbasaran, Tragab, Shifan Cheng, and William7019, that edit on Unified mechanics theory-related articles.

I don't see any overlap between them. Tercer (talk) 13:24, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

@Tercer I'm happy to be corrected. Please would you make that correction at the SPI in Comments by Other Users in order that others may also understand? Adding William7019 who I missed and adding Bona85 to the appropriate SPI, creating one if necessary? Fiddle Faddle 13:50, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I would withdraw the SPI instead and start a different one with the correct targets. It makes your case stronger and the clerk's life easier. Tercer (talk) 14:10, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

I think there are too many participants now to take that course of action. I would have looked at that had I not had to be offline for several hours Fiddle Faddle 16:06, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

The AfD was closed and the result was... (suspence)... delete. Just to have it as a reference: here the grandpa picture (currently nominated for deletion). --SimoneD89 (talk) 16:49, 20 April 2021 (UTC)

Merging electromagnetism and classical electromagnetism?

A few months ago, there was a brief discussion about perhaps merging classical electromagnetism into electromagnetism; see here. That proposal could probably use more input. XOR'easter (talk) 03:17, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I changed my mind about that, though. I think electromagnetism can be a perfectly sensible article as an overview of the different versions of the theory: from Maxwell's equations, to explicitly covariant, to Einstein-Maxwell, to quantum electrodynamics. Perhaps also mentioning electroweak unification. As it is the article doesn't do any of that, but it just needs to be shown some love. As for classical electromagnetism, it should be just redirected to Maxwell's equations, as it covers the same content but does a much worse job. Tercer (talk) 08:27, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I think that there is more to classical electromagnetism than Maxwell's equations. Yes, Maxwell's equations explain most of classical electromagnetism, but an explanation is not all there is in a major topic. I wouldn't favour just redirecting.Chjoaygame (talk) 09:07, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I tend to concur that there is not really a case for merging or redirecting. The articles are a bit of a mishmash (but nevertheless readable), but merging in the hope of focusing effort is not a great argument if the natural structure is larger. It would be helpful if there was one overview article (maybe Electromagnetism?) that gave an overview of how all the related articles hang together, and all the other articles refer to it for global structure. It would make more sense to first focus effort on making the hierarchy clear in the overview article, and then to focus on referencing this in each of the related articles. I think this would have the effect of then focusing any editing that does happen on the topic of each article in question. Every now and then an under/post-grad/hobbyist comes along and cleans stuff up, which is when an existing clear overall structure will help. —Quondum 14:37, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Geometric measure of entanglement

During the expert cleanup, I removed the expert needed tag on Geometric measure of entanglement for being unclear, but I still feel that the article has a major problem. It is a highly technical stub that was created by an account whose only edits were to this page, except for a bot-reverted BLP-violating edit to Josh Bornstein. Topic is probably notable, however. What do you think? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 16:38, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I'm out of my depth in this area, but this does not have the feel of a topic that WP should have a separate article about. I think that it is a candidate for merging to the only article that references it, namely Multipartite entanglement. —Quondum 16:47, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

I had noticed it back then, and didn't know what to do. Although the article was in a bad state, and nobody cared about it, it's legitimate research, and the topic is notable. But just because a topic is notable it doesn't mean it needs to have a separate article, we're free to organize in a more sensible manner. In this particular case, I think the out-of-context technical stub is indeed not helpful, I concur with the merge.

The existence of this stub illustrates how Wikipedia is just a bunch of random people writing articles about whatever they like; if I were to write an article about a measure of entanglement the geometric measure wouldn't be my first, second, or third choices. It is not even an entanglement monotone! Also, in the multipartite case entanglement measures are much less useful than in the bipartite case, hence the relative lack of interest. Normally one just uses a robustness measure and moves on with life. Tercer (talk) 18:25, 21 April 2021 (UTC)

Articles on conferences

I noticed this in the bot report about new articles:

• European Conference Physics of Magnetism (edit | talk | history | links | watch | logs)

What should we look for to establish the notability of physics conferences? XOR'easter (talk) 20:57, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Gut feeling says mainstream attendance (as in non-crank, non-ultraspecialist), sponsorship by non-crank societies, and how often their proceedings are cited. For example, I'd say the CAP Congress is notable (although it might be better to simply talk of it in the CAP article), based on its status within mainstream Canadian physics research. But a conference like 20th Annual Foo Society Conference on Laser Coherence in Liquid Media, which might be fully mainstream, is too specialized to have garnered any mainstream coverage. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:26, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

That sounds reasonable. My guess is that it's often easier to write about the organization that runs a conference, since it probably has a variety of activities (conferences, publications, awards, etc.), all of which might get third-party documentation. XOR'easter (talk) 18:31, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Alternative theories of quantum evolution

The article Alternative theories of quantum evolution is ... exactly as poorly sourced as I would have expected it to be. XOR'easter (talk) 16:51, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Yup. It has been PRODed before. I'd say that it is an uncontestable AfD candidate. —Quondum 17:10, 22 April 2021 (UTC)

Wild speculations with basic mistakes. Don't see why we should have an article on it. Strictly speaking the notability threshold for bollocks is the same as for serious theories, but I think we should demand more. Tercer (talk) 08:48, 23 April 2021 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Alternative theories of quantum evolution. XOR'easter (talk) 19:54, 24 April 2021 (UTC)

TfD: Template:Planck constant

Nominated for deletion as inappropriate use of the template feature. (Also an orphan since I removed its only transclusion.) —Quondum 20:29, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

Possible duplicate article

I'm having a hard time discerning what, if any, diference there is between photoluminescence and fluorescence. Are these articles describing the same thing? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:41, 30 April 2021 (UTC)

As I understand it, photoluminescence is a more general phenomenon, encompassing both fluorescence and phosphorescence. So, no. —Quondum 20:48, 30 April 2021 (UTC)