Wikipedia:Good article reassessment/Force/2

Force[edit]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Article (edit | visual edit | history) · Article talk (edit | history) · Watch • Watch article reassessment page • Most recent review

Result: Kept, with thanks, once again, to XOR'easter. ~~ AirshipJungleman29 (talk) 13:05, 11 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

GA from 2008. Quite a lot of uncited material in the article. Onegreatjoke (talk) 16:10, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This page needs work. I completely disagree with the definition, which is only for moving objects. I can think of many examples where this is not a useful definition.
I would use the standard definition of force as the change in energy with position, since energy is fundamental. The derivative part should be added after the lead as KISS. Ldm1954 (talk) 17:10, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think that defining force in terms of an even less familiar concept, energy, is the right way to begin an article of this sort. XOR'easter (talk) 01:44, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Force is a derivative term, it is not fundamental. Some examples are static friction, rolling friction, Hellman-Feynman, the derivatives of a Landau expansion of electromechanical terms, capillary. All of these are derivatives, most have nothing to do with motion in the way described by this article.

As one common example of a mistake, dynamic friction is the derivative with respect to motion of dissipative energies such as phonon/electron/plastic/elastic. Static friction is a derivative with respect to movement of the integrated. elastic strain energy.

Just my opinion that force needs rigor in definition. Not everyone may agree. Ldm1954 (talk) 02:06, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Trying to squeeze every concept of "force" up to and including those derived from quantum field theory into the first two sentences of a Wikipedia article that will be read by high-school students is an exercise in futility. We could try to cover Hellman–Feynman, gauge bosons, and the Einstein field equations, but we'd just be talking to ourselves. XOR'easter (talk) 02:24, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(I'm reading your reply as to my comment).

Sorry my list wasn't clear: the items were no for the lead but the article. The lead needs small work. But the overall concept of "force" has history that illuminates its curious role in physics, eg action at a distance / general relativity. So just some missing content that makes Force less "good". Johnjbarton (talk) 12:46, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

My reply wasn't to your comment, but to the comment just above it. My own feeling is that getting the lead exactly right should be the last part of the revision; it's hard to write a good summary without having the material that needs summarizing already in hand. XOR'easter (talk) 16:11, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There is a lot of good material here.

Lead definition is wrong, as shown in the section "Third law" in this very article.

No mention of action-at-distance issues, one of the core aspects of "force" as a concept.

No mention of general relativity converting Newtonian gravitational "force" into geometry.

Section "Descriptions > Quantum mechanics" is unreferenced and a muddle. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:20, 22 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There actually was a little bit about general relativity in the "Gravitational" subsection. Rather than repeating that, I added a pointer to it from the end of the special relativity part. XOR'easter (talk) 16:27, 23 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I've added some words about "action at a distance" to the segue from Newtonian to Einsteinian gravity.

What we probably ought to do now is run a fine-toothed comb through the text and scrape out weird niche stuff (like one person's pet peeve with how everyone else in physics talks about force, which they wrote into the Wikipedia article in 2004, where it has sat ever since — that kind of thing). Some of the references may be substandard. There's no real reason to cite, e.g., press releases for a topic like this one. XOR'easter (talk) 00:11, 24 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The GA criteria now explicitly call for at least one citation per paragraph. (I think this is carrying a reasonable rule-of-thumb too far, for the sake of having a box to check off, but them's the breaks.) This probably isn't too hard to meet in this case, since we can raid the shelf of introductory physics textbooks [1][2]. XOR'easter (talk) 21:03, 27 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I'm happier with this article now than I was when we started, so that's something. XOR'easter (talk) 16:54, 29 July 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The OED provides the etymology and historical quotations for strong force and related terms as meaning 7.g of "strong". Unfortunately, our {{cite OED}} template doesn't seem to provide a ready way to cite individual senses of a word. XOR'easter (talk) 18:21, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ok but I wonder if the physics sources used by OED would be more useful. (The ref as it reads in the article sounds like "here dummy this is the definition of "strong"; we can't tell that it says anything about "force"). Johnjbarton (talk) 18:24, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

They pick primary sources that illustrate the sense in which a term is being used, as is their typical M.O. Skipping past the secondary/tertiary source to cite primary sources directly goes against our typical way of doing things. I tweaked that reference (in what might be an off-label use of the citation template, but whatever) to indicate that we're citing it for the specialized physics meaning. XOR'easter (talk) 18:32, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

There are seven citations to University Physics, Sears, Young & Zemansky, pp. 18–38. Given the profusion of textbook editions, that's not really specific enough to be verifiable. The editions with only those three authors all seem fairly old, too; for example, the 12th edition (2008) also includes Freedman and Ford. (And the page range 18–38 is definitely not correct for that edition.) XOR'easter (talk) 18:47, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This page range matches a chapter which introduces forces in the 6th edition (1982). Here's a link to archive.org: [3] Jähmefyysikko (talk) 19:25, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I was thinking that we'd have to go back to the '80s to find an edition that matched. If everything attributed to that book is in that stretch of the 6th edition (I can't check at the moment), then we can go ahead and fill in the metadata appropriately, and the article will be in decent shape overall. XOR'easter (talk) 20:27, 4 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Metadata now filled in. XOR'easter (talk) 23:17, 5 August 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.