Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive October 2018

Awards / medals of the Optical Society

Do we need all these Category:Awards of the Optical Society? I redirected a bunch of non-notable awards of the optical to the main society page, the editor has since moved all those redirects to draftspace: Draft:R. W. Wood Prize, Draft:Nick Holonyak Jr. Award, Draft:Herbert Walther Award, Emmett N. Leith Medal, Draft:C.E.K. Mees Medal‎, Charles Hard Townes Award, David Richardson Medal, Adolph Lomb Medal. We should not have a page on every single award from a learned society, I agree some awards are notable but many of these have no stand-alone notability or significant coverage in reliable sources. Polyamorph (talk) 08:14, 9 October 2018 (UTC)

Orders of magnitude

There are multiple deletion discussions for "orders of magnitude" pages, currently listed at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Science. XOR'easter (talk) 13:48, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

The antisymmetric gauge

Can somebody confirm the notability of this object: The almost anti-symmetric gauge. The author made a couple editions in other articles to include a link to it.--MaoGo (talk) 13:00, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

I've only found three papers that name this gauge with citations<4. --MaoGo (talk) 14:52, 16 October 2018 (UTC)

The two references provided in the article are published in good journals (Physical Review B and Scientific Reports), but they appear to have had essentially no influence so far. I'd call this a case of WP:TOOSOON. XOR'easter (talk) 13:53, 18 October 2018 (UTC)

Here I submit the article to deletion: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/The almost anti-symmetric gauge --MaoGo (talk) 09:19, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Signs of velocity in Lorentz transformation of electric and magnetic fields

Please see Classical electromagnetism and special relativity. I was trying to clarify someone's edit when I realized that there seem to be inconsistencies in the article in the choice of plus or minus signs applied to the velocity of the primed frame relative to the unprimed frame. I do not trust my own understanding enough to go through the article and correct all the signs. Could someone more expert in this area please do that. Thank you. JRSpriggs (talk) 04:14, 20 October 2018 (UTC)

List of baryons colouring issue

I was looking through maintenance categories, saw the articles with accessibility issues category, and found the List of baryons there. It seems not to be accessible to colour blind people. It's been tagged since January 2015. Knowing more about accessibility than physics, I can't fix this, but I figured I'd write this message, since it's probably more likely to be seen here than just on the talk page. – Pretended leer (talk) 12:42, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Apart from the use of red, green, and blue in one diagram and the usual blue-links, the only color related issue which is apparent to me is mentioned as "Values in red have not been firmly established by experiments, but are predicted by the quark model and are consistent with the measurements.". Actually a dark red is used, which even I find difficult to distinguish from the usual black typeface. Is that what you are referring to? If so, then perhaps it is just a matter of replacing the coloring with some other kind of mark such as a dagger† or question mark?. JRSpriggs (talk) 20:20, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

Someone already tried to do that, but noticed some cells were entirely red and others had parts in red. Quoting the message Thisisnotatest left on the talk page there: "Some items have both the 1/2 and the plus sign in red, some have just the plus sign in red. Do the ones that have just the plus sign in red have the part not in red established? Or is it a markup error?" That's why I thought maybe someone knowing about physics could help. – Pretended leer (talk) 20:35, 10 October 2018 (UTC)

There colors are fine, and they were accurate and triple-checked when they were put in. I don't think I've updated the table since 2016, so I should do that at one point. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 01:12, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

The red text is readable on the white background, but that's not what this is about. I showed the table to a relative with low vision, made the text as big as I could and she still couldn't tell the red text from the black text. She might be the type of person who would use a screen reader, but screen readers don't say which colours text has. – Pretended leer (talk) 10:19, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

Is there another color which color-blind people could more easily distinguish from black and white than dark-red? Say light-green? JRSpriggs (talk) 21:09, 11 October 2018 (UTC)

I say just color everything black. This information is not important. The idea that a baryon will turn out to have the wrong spin (compared to the prediction of the quark model) or whatever is ludicrously unlikely. Or at any rate, I think we can be as confident in the not-yet-directly-observed spin of a baryon, as we are about pretty much any other randomly-chosen statement of fact about a subatomic particle that you'll find in a wikipedia article. It's in the same category as, say, the possibility that the electron has a different gravitational mass and inertial mass. Sure, it's possible, and it hasn't been directly measured, but is it worth bringing up? I say no. The few experts who have reason to care about these kinds of things are reading primary sources and PDG, not wikipedia. --Steve (talk) 01:46, 12 October 2018 (UTC)

I think that could be one option. I'm not sure how accessible the primary sources are though. An attempt at converting a PDF to plain text did show some funny stuff that might not be very useful for someone with a disability, but maybe blind people use different tools or settings that would let them get some information I didn't. Also, see the comment below about italics. – Pretended leer {talk} 18:03, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

What about using italics for that? — A. di M.  12:33, 29 October 2018 (UTC)

Screen readers can be configured to indicate bold and italics, but they don't do it by default. I guess we could combine italics with WAI-ARIA labels. Speaking of screen reader accessibility, I think I'll replace the dagger symbols with Template:dagger so that at least those read correctly. As for making similar templates to get other non-words pronounced correctly, I'll ask at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Accessibility which if any of those aren't being read by screen readers. – Pretended leer {talk} 18:03, 29 October 2018 (UTC)