User talk:Mary at CERN

Wow...where have you been all our lives? What a fabulous first contribution! Welcome, welcome, welcome! --PMDrive1061 (talk) 03:23, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Why this article?

You seem to have an agenda for promoting Hagen/Guralnik/Kibble over Brout/Englert and Higgs. But it is hopeless: these authors are going to go off into history intertwined. The article you wrote claims to analyze the differences between the papers, but it does not do so. Instead, it gives little evidence of having read the three articles, let alone the context of physics in 1964.Likebox (talk) 18:48, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Nobel Prize

I understand that nobel prizes can be unhappy affairs, and leave bitter feelings among those whose work is unfairly skipped. But you can take comfort in the fact that in this age, Nobel prizes do not determine who gets to write history, because as you can see, anyone can write history, and it will get read. So the problem of recognition has essentially been permanently solved.

Even if Brout/Higgs/Englert got a prize, nobody will lose track of GHK as long as there is an internet, just as Cabibbo will always be recognized as the discoverer of quark mixing, even if for some reason Kobayashi and Maskawa were regarded as more Nobel-worthy.

Historically speaking, there is pre-internet work which was much more marginalized than GHK ever was or ever will be. Pomeron/Reggeon work was attacked from 1977 by anti-S-matrix faction. That stuff was laughed at, and it made strong predictions which were only really confirmed 20 years later. But do you think Chew/Frautschi/Mandelstam will ever get a Nobel? I mean, Gribov is already dead. Another tragic case is Grassman variables and Berezin integration. Candlin invented that, and he did not get credit, even though the whole world teaches this method. These mistakes can be fixed in two seconds here, which is why this project is nice.

On the other hand, there's a challenge to this fully open model which is0 developing on Scholarpedia. Scholarpedia requires a committee to invite scholars for a topic, which creates an insane barrier to entry. I mean, you need a PhD just to post a comment. This makes some of the physics articles susceptible to the same disease that caused so much of the literature to turn to crap in the 70s and 80s. Physics scholarpedia has only been picking up steam for a few months, and there is already one annoying uneditable article about the two-gluon model of the pomeron which has crappy history and misleading text.

Since you seem to know a lot about high energy physics, maybe you can help translate the scholarpedia article to Wikipedia. That requires a complete rewrite, hopefully with more diverse sources, and which will allow anonymous fixing of the history section to be fair to everyone. Does that seem up your alley?Likebox (talk) 05:52, 23 August 2009 (UTC)

Thanks again for your interest. Each of these papers should be evaluated on their merits. The facts about the papers are clear. The order in PRL was BE, H, and GHK each separated by a couple months. Higgs has the boson named after him. GHK merits were outlined in the Wikie article (Overview and Differences of 1964 PRL Symmetry Breaking papers). So I agree with you, all of these teams will go down in history together. I am familiar with scholarpedia as you will note it is citied in the Wiki article. TK wrote the article on the boson and history. While I do not know him, TK has a reputation for being VERY humble and thoughtful to a fault so I am sure it is accurate. Now making scholarpedia so it can be understood by a mere mortal - that is another challenge. I think my overall premise (and as had played out over this dialogue) is that over time things seem easy, and distinctions get lost as the particle physics community accepts certain directions. Each team also has written their history on the discovery (see references) so they have explained how they see the history - frankly each pursued it separately. I will say that these historical surveys do a pretty good job of outlining what physics was like in the 60's. Hope all is well.

Ok, sorry for harassing you so much. You are new here, so there's a chance for some really new substantive physics contributions. I agree that the scholarpedia article on Higgs etc is very good, but it essetially follows the Wikipedia article in structure and content, except in more pedantic notation and with somewhat less of an emphasis on condensed matter physics.

On the other hand, there is already a scholarpedia article on this possibly crazy model where a pomeron is thought of as coupling to individual quarks. Scholarpedia presents what I am not sure is a complete history (this is a weird idea and they invited a prominent author to write about it, who knows what weird corners of history this guy might have unintentially left out), and I don't know which papers are what. It seems to be based on the idea that total cross sections for pions are about 66 percent of total cross sections for baryons. That's not much evidence. If this was on Wikipedia, self interest would lead every author that ever wrote about this to put a link to their article. Also every person that tried to figure this out and ran into a roadblock would put something up. An experimentalist might even say "The total cross section for K is somewhat different, and it fails completely for rho", I don't know. (This might be silly--- can you extract rho total cross sections at high energies from photons?) This type of thing is impossible on scholarpedia, where anonymous comments are filtered out.

Then there are the hostile comments. Like--- this looks like crap. Pomeron is hadron-wide, you can't couple it to quarks. That's coupling an object in one dual picture to an object in another dual picture. Probably this type of criticism won't be added to the article by the author. I can see why scholarpedia is seductive. Nobody wants to lose control of their field to the unruly mob. But if the idea is strong enough, then losing control is not bad.

Also, I believe that if we do our job right, and all these articles get written plainly, then everybody will understand everything. Same way as everybody today knows Euclidean geometry. That looked impossible too 2000 years ago.Likebox (talk) 14:12, 25 August 2009 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia from Falcon8765

Hi, Mary at CERN. I welcome you to Wikipedia! Thank you for all of your edits. I hope you like editing here and being part of Wikipedia! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); when you save the page, this will turn into your name and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or put {{helpme}} (and what you need help with) on your talk page and someone will show up very soon to answer your questions. Again, welcome! Falcon8765 (talk) 21:06, 19 August 2009 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You could also click on the signature button located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 14:47, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Higgs Boson

Hi, I just wanted to say thank you for reverting this edit very admirable compared to alot of 'discussions' I see round here. I'd never assume anything as you'd be surprised at the people who I have seen have edited the CERN related articles since I've been around, from the tin hat brigade to some well known physicists. Many thanks. ^Khukri 06:09, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Your recent edits seem to have the appearance of edit warring after a review of the reverts you have made on Higgs boson. Users are expected to collaborate and discuss with others and avoid editing disruptively.

Please be particularly aware, the three-revert rule states that:

1. Making more than three reversions on a single page within a 24-hour period is almost always grounds for an immediate block.
2. Do not edit war even if you believe you are right.

If you find yourself in an editing dispute, use the article's talk page to discuss the changes; work towards a version that represents consensus among editors. You can post a request for help at an appropriate noticeboard or seek dispute resolution. In some cases it may be appropriate to request temporary page protection. If you engage in an edit war, you may be blocked from editing without further notice. ^Khukri 15:24, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Your recent edits

Hello. In case you didn't know, when you add content to talk pages and Wikipedia pages that have open discussion, you should sign your posts by typing four tildes ( ~~~~ ) at the end of your comment. You could also click on the signature button or located above the edit window. This will automatically insert a signature with your username or IP address and the time you posted the comment. This information is useful because other editors will be able to tell who said what, and when. Thank you. --SineBot (talk) 18:07, 14 October 2011 (UTC)

Higgs

Hi Mary, I hope we are finally heading towards a compromise on the text. However, I couldn't help noticing this post which you were kind enough to withdraw from the talk page. I am sorry if you felt that I was being aggressive, but you must understand that conflict of interest is a big no-no in Wikipedia, and that other editors might get the wrong impression from your tendency to use Guralnik's arguments without proper attribution (starting from the original version of the "1964 PRL" article, down to the most recent incident), as well as from what could be interpreted as a privileged channel of communication with some of the actors of this story. I also find your contention that I repeatedly shifted the emphasis of the discussion unfair. If you check my posts, you will see that I constantly argued against "focusing on the physics", because this is not what the talk pages of the Wikipedia articles are for. In fact, I do not particularly care about who gets the credit for the Higgs boson, and if you and I were to meet in the CERN corridors you might very well convince me that the GHK paper is so much better than the other two. However, this would be completely irrelevant for the Wikipedia article. Indeed, the latter cannot be based on our personal understanding of the original PRL papers, but only on reliable, verifiable, impartial and clearly attributed secondary sources. Perhaps you were not too familiar with the various Wikipedia policies I referred to in the course of our discussion, but they are there for a reason. Just imagine what would happen to articles on more contentious issues such as global warming or Palestine if such rules were not in place... Cheers, Ptrslv72 (talk) 21:51, 14 October 2011 (UTC)