Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive June 2021

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Most viewed start article in this Wikiproject

Rattleback 119,242 3,974 Start--Coin945 (talk) 15:08, 30 May 2021 (UTC)

Next?--Srleffler (talk) 05:02, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

Nike Dattani

There is a discussion at Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest/Noticeboard#Scientific_contributions_of_Nike_Dattani that would benefit from input by folks with physics expertise. Russ Woodroofe (talk) 11:41, 1 June 2021 (UTC)

I've requested the admins to reach a consensus early and close it as soon as possible (14 days after the last edit), so I would appreciate if you don't add more edits to it which would further delay consensus by another 14 days. I'm always happy to answer questions on my talk page or to be pinged on the talk pages of the article themselves though! Dr. Universe (talk) 01:31, 3 June 2021 (UTC)

Entropic force

I guess I shouldn't be surprised that a topic like entropic force would have accumulated a certain amount of ... suboptimal material. I tried cleaning it up, but I can already feel that my wiki-time is about up for the day. Reading it over with a critical eye would be appreciated. XOR'easter (talk) 21:10, 6 June 2021 (UTC)

Entropic gravity also needs a careful look. Xxanthippe (talk) 22:27, 6 June 2021 (UTC).

Likely COI at Relativity priority dispute and History of special relativity

Primary source and COI-issue at both articles. Comments welcome at Talk:Relativity priority dispute#Proposed addition to Time Line section. - DVdm (talk) 08:56, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Big error in false vacuum decay article

Probably, there is a big error in False vacuum decay article. See Talk:False_vacuum_decay#Probability_of_vacuum_decay_cited_erroneous?!.

For sure, it is not properly formulated and not quite properly cited!

Please fix the error ASAP. --VictorPorton (talk) 07:22, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

These probabilities of the false vacuum decaying are pure speculation anyway, putting a number to it is a fools' errand. The source for this particular number [1] doesn't seem to be even peer-reviewed, so you can simply removed the offending sentence. Tercer (talk) 09:45, 10 June 2021 (UTC)
I snipped that sentence. XOR'easter (talk) 21:45, 10 June 2021 (UTC)

Talk:Robert_Lanza#Request_For_Comment_Robert_Lanza

This RfC may be of interest to the community here. XOR'easter (talk) 22:10, 11 June 2021 (UTC)

Quantized inertia again

Quantized inertia is still tagged for being slanted to a fringe perspective and relying too much on primary sources. Anyone feel like taking a whack at it? XOR'easter (talk) 16:43, 19 May 2021 (UTC)

I'm kinda puzzled why this isn't just flagged for deletion. Even though it has been covered in a few "sciency" magazines and has garnered a rebuttal, it does not look to me like it meets WP:GNG. The detailed presentation of the claims and arguments do not belong in WP IMO – at best, it should be a section in an article about fringe theories. It is not mentioned in Alternatives to general relativity, and it shouldn't be, since it does not deserve that title: it is not a theory of physics; from the description, it is just a couple of high-level hand-wavy postulates that give a direct translation from horizons. If the article stays, I think it should be stripped down to two or so paragraphs that give only a top-level description. None of the detail should remain. —Quondum 23:24, 19 May 2021 (UTC)
I'm open to either an extreme trimming or a trip to AfD. XOR'easter (talk) 14:44, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
I don't think it should be deleted, this nonsense is unfortunately notable. I concur with stripping down the presentation, though, there's no point in detailing its ideas and claims. Tercer (talk) 14:49, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Tercer, could you give a sense of why you think that it is notable? Notability does not include everything that popular science mags have chosen to report on or about which a few papers have been published in journals. The "not even wrong" stuff should not generally be treated as notable unless it has become well-known and been seriously considered. —Quondum 15:39, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Coverage in popular science magazines does count for notability. There are three sources like this in the article, and also a debunking published in a somewhat serious journal. At this point it's better to have an article pointing out that it's bullshit. Tercer (talk) 15:57, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
Okay, I guess it is unimportant whether I think that threshold of notability allows all sorts of clutter (I think it is suitable to allow a redirect to a section somewhere. I've seen similar things die in AfD, being left only as a mention in say the bio page of the proponent with a redirect to it). What is more important is to have something clear about its status, as this stops recreation of nonsense, and either a tiny article or a section with a redirect to it would serve that purpose. So, it seems that we have consensus for a severe trim. —Quondum 16:14, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
I poked around a bit looking for a suitable target for a selective-merge-and-redirect, but I didn't find one. "Severe trim" looks like the best way to go. XOR'easter (talk) 18:26, 20 May 2021 (UTC)
I cut out some chunks, but it still needs more surgery. I noticed a link at the bottom to a TEDx talk presented by the proposer, McCulloch, and near the end was jarred awake by the mention of the NASA EmDrive experiment as evidence. I think that firmly places his use of "scientific method" ... —Quondum 19:40, 22 May 2021 (UTC)

Let me make a list.

  • It's notable, in that it certainly garnered attention.
  • As I understand it, its the idea that since the universe is finite-sized, its a kind of "cavity" with standing-wave modes in it. A kind of radar cavity or drum or guitar string with vibratory excitations. (Dressed up to make it sound a bit deeper than that).
  • The above seems plausible, intriguing, just enough to make you stop and pause and think that maybe it could be true. In that sense, it's not "just plain wrong", so calling it "bullshit" is (highly) inappropriate.
  • It does seem to be open to experimental testing.
  • It seems hard/impossible to spin it into anything deeper than what I wrote. To develop it as a theory, there would need to be actual experiments that it actually explains, that are not otherwise explainable. There need to be signposts pointing at how to elaborate it into a more respectable theory. Something a bit more than "the universe is a cavity with spectral modes".
  • It has a (very) unfortunate origin: it became notable precisely because it purported to explain the EmDrive (and also the Pioneer anomaly, and also the flyby anomaly.) This origin story is what makes it cranky and fringe.
  • The EmDrive itself is a saga of stunningly bad experimental protocols, which perhaps is not unusual, except that the claims were so outrageous that of course everyone took a peek to see what the fuss was all about.

Alas. I suspect that the idea of quantized inertia will forever remain a physics novelty, like one of those "intelligence test" toys at a pancake house that you can fiddle with until your pancakes arrive. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 19:43, 26 May 2021 (UTC)

Oh hang on. I just looked at the version of 27 June 2020 and ... um, it seems maybe the editing cut out the wrong stuff. The stuff about globular clusters and wide binaries is actually interesting. You should have kept that. What you should delete is all the fiddle-faddle mumbo-jumbo about Unruh and Casimir effect. All that is crap, as far as I'm concerned. Just keep one or two sentences about the cosmological horizon, give a numerical value for it (its the hubble time, I guess) Keep the derivation of the quantized acceleration and it's numerical value. Keep the Tully-Fisher relation. Keep the globular clusters and wide binaries. Remove mention of Pioneer anomaly. Remove the "resonant cavity" b.s. (this is code-word for EmDrive.) Remove the "Dresden experiment" thing (which seems to be some EmDrive reincarnation). What I get out of the June 2020 version of the article is that McCulloch is a bit of a crank (proton radius, seriously?) who is engaged in one-size-fits-all creative numerology. Despite this rather unsavory origin story of this particular bit of numerology, the fact that it does seem to get at least the astrophysics right seems to be the most notable thing about it, yet that was cut. What's left is quite unappetizing. What's left, without the astrophysics results, is AfD'able. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 20:09, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
That was my bad. You have a point. More selective trimming is needed, but nevertheless a lot of trimming. I'll need to review that. —Quondum 20:22, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
Let me know if you want me to participate, edit, or comment; otherwise I'm done. (I'm taking the astrophysics claims at face value. If they're misleading, then whoops!) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 21:01, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
Please go ahead; feel absolutely free. My goal has been to trim out non-encyclopaedic nonsense. My time is going to be very constrained, so for now I may do very little. —Quondum 21:15, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
The astrophysics claims all seem to be from the inventor himself, so I see no reason to take them at face value. More importantly, from the viewpoint of WP policy, if nobody other than McCulloch and coauthors have talked about the astrophysics claims, then it's not really our job to cover them. The closest thing to a substantial secondary source is the criticism by Renda, which focuses on a more fundamental level. And no, I don't consider Advances in Astrophysics to be a reliable source; the publisher is obviously predatory and their most recent article is Chandra "COVID came from space!" Wickramasinghe writing about "Polonnaruwa Stones Revisited – Evidence for Non-Terrestrial Life". XOR'easter (talk) 22:59, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
An article we can't delete because it is "notable" but which has no content that is worth including ... I'm for deletion, but we have some opposition. —Quondum 23:08, 26 May 2021 (UTC)
The claim about "wide binaries need modified gravity" seems untenable in the light of more recent publications (e.g., [2][3]). XOR'easter (talk) 14:39, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
I like the second ref that you list: a mundane solution ("we just hadn't seen that" – hidden binary and triple components). However, shouldn't we be careful of just removing clearly failed claims? Would it not make more sense to list the claim with a statement that it has since been shown to be untenable (in a sort of bullet list of such claims)? Listing failed claims gives a better sense of how crackpot the theory is and how quick the proponent were to exploit poor evidence. —Quondum 15:06, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
The trouble is that if nobody has written a journal paper specifically evaluating McCulloch's quantized inertia based on these later mundane proposals within orthodox theory, then writing that evaluation into an article ourselves is doing the job of a researcher rather than an encyclopedist. To me, it seems more justifiable to cut material on the grounds that nobody other than McCulloch and a couple coauthors ever cared about it, than to put energy into a (WP:NOR-skirting) rebuttal ourselves. XOR'easter (talk) 15:44, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
It would not be appropriate to synthesize a rebuttal; the most we could do in that case is to present the counterpoint (with references) that the data anomaly has been explained in another way; the reader would judge for themselves. I guess I am having difficulty getting to grips with what should be included. If something doesn't belong when related information shows that it is valueless, it follows that it didn't belong even before the counter-evidence appeared. Wouldn't this argument suggest that the article should be empty, since only the authors ever cared about any of the claims? This really feels like something that should be just a mention in a bio article, and if the person is not notable enough to have a bio, this does not suddenly justify the notability of an article on the theory. —Quondum 16:11, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
Note that the second article that you linked directly undercuts the "wide binaries" claim that is still in the article. —Quondum 16:17, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
It looks like there are three secondary sources: a credulous piece in Vice, a few paragraphs in a 5-page New Scientist story, and Renda (2019). Everything else is either by McCulloch and immediate collaborators, background that does not mention quantized inertia itself, and/or published somewhere substandard (AIP Conference Proceedings will take more or less anything). It's possible that all we can say without synthesizing a rebuttal (i.e., doing the astrophysics community's work for them) is so short it ought to be merged somewhere else. I'm not sure where that would be, though. XOR'easter (talk) 18:55, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
I see as attractive the idea of culling claims that are not expressed in secondary sources. Somehow I can't get myself to see stuff written by a popular science journalist as a secondary source, since it is just uncritically echoing primary and secondary viewpoints, which are vague, such as "one physicist I spoke to on background described it to me". That leaves only the Renda rebuttal as anything that I might consider to qualify. In a sense, it seems that the rags establish notability (through the fact of reporting) without establishing any content that we can use: we can use these for the statement "McCulloch proposed QI", but not for writing about the theory of QI. —Quondum 20:03, 27 May 2021 (UTC)
Oh, there's also an item in Popular Mechanics (I think that makes the three that Tercer mentioned?). They don't have very high standards when it comes to fringe stuff, but they do at least quote a critic. XOR'easter (talk) 22:54, 28 May 2021 (UTC)

Ugh. Teach me to stir the pot. I now regret opening my mouth. Regarding synthesis in WP: this is reasonable only when there are many primary and secondary sources. Yet here, there is effectively only one person as the primary source. It seems like there's only one or two primary-source rebuttals? And some secondary-source echo-chambers. I'm now thinking that synthesizing this into a long WP article is indeed a mistake. I did find the arguments plausible, but "plausible" is a very low bar. I find plot lines of TV shows to be plausible, too. Good science requires a sharply higher level of critical thinking, and it appears that maybe there aren't any primary sources that have done this? It's late-nite here, I'll try to look at this tomorrow. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 02:54, 29 May 2021 (UTC)

Conundrum

Quantized inertia is probably just an instance of a broader class of cases in the physics zone, where there just is not much that we can reliably source for an article, but it triggers enough interest from the "physics fan" type that several people think that they should find something in WP on it. I don't object to stubs noting non-notable things (it hardly matters to have these around) if it addresses the need of those people. Yet this category of topic often has little that one can say from a reliable source, because there are not really any. It is almost as though we need to find a standard approach to these, maybe a "landingpad" article: one that one ends up at on an idea that fails WP:GNG, but which has had some level of nonscientific coverage. Such an article would have rules akin to a disambiguation page or redirect limiting what it is permitted to contain; its sole purpose would be to communicate the status of the topic and to provide links to coverage. When possible, a redirect to a section somewhere should be preferred. —Quondum 22:59, 31 May 2021 (UTC)

This is a question for a wikilawyer, no? Where are they when you need them? Doesn't the medical community get these, every time a new cure or pill is discovered? What do they do? 67.198.37.16 (talk) 05:01, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
This is a question about a larger issue, namely structuring Wikipedia, not about deciding any particular case. I expect that there are other fields with the same problem, including medicine. I see the problem as being related to the social medium echo chamber problem for nonsense (whether it be extremism, quackery, cultism or physics nonsense), where WP is providing a sounding board through not having a clear way of handling it. Simply relying on disregarding the effort wasted on sweeping away marginal nonsense rather than pegging it visibly as a marginal topic suggests the lack of a suitable mechanism. I don't see this as being for "wikilawyers". —Quondum 13:05, 1 June 2021 (UTC)
On the medicine side of Wikipedia, it was recognized that because human life is not to be trifled with, the standards for sourcing have to be high. The popular press is generally not a reliable source for scientific and medical information in articles. Most medical news articles fail to discuss important issues such as evidence quality, costs, and risks versus benefits, and news articles too often convey wrong or misleading information about health care. Articles in newspapers and popular magazines tend to overemphasize the certainty of any result, for instance, presenting a new and experimental treatment as "the cure" for a disease or an every-day substance as "the cause" of a disease. Newspapers and magazines may also publish articles about scientific results before those results have been published in a peer-reviewed journal or reproduced by other experimenters. Such articles may be based uncritically on a press release, which themselves promote research with uncertain relevance to human health and do not acknowledge important limitations, even when issued by an academic medical center. If we applied that spirit to quantized inertia, we'd have maybe one usable source, and the subject would fail WP:GNG. XOR'easter (talk) 15:14, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
From a notability perspective, any topic on WP needs reliable sourcing, so I see little difference: QI as a topic fails WP:GNG solidly, I believe. I am not talking about notability, but rather how to handle the edge cases that fail WP:GNG as topics but the fact that they have captured some attention from the public could be considered to be notable. As such, the topic of the article could be Publication of QI, not QI, if you see the distinction between topics that I am drawing. So I was suggesting a sort of non-article that does not cover a topic, only its existence. —Quondum 16:17, 2 June 2021 (UTC)
Sorry, I'm not quite following. I know we do have articles on topics that got far more media attention than scientific scrutiny; An Exceptionally Simple Theory of Everything comes to mind. In that case, there was one peer-reviewed mathematics paper in response, which physicists basically treated as closing the door on it. But there was a lot more media splash, and also a larger amount of peer-reviewed discussion. Is that the kind of example you had in mind? XOR'easter (talk) 15:05, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
E8 Theory is a nice exposition of something that is primarily about how the theory fared than about the content of the theory. In QI (and no doubt many other cases), should have a similar approach, but there is much less coverage. But do we have a legitimate way to say "it has been ignored for a reason" within WP guidelines? —Quondum 16:47, 3 June 2021 (UTC)
I noticed that two of the three pop-science sources (on which the wiki-notability of the topic seems to hang) discuss it in the context of a space drive. Perhaps the whole article should be redirected. A few sentences at EmDrive#Speculation_regarding_new_physical_laws might be all the topic is worth. XOR'easter (talk) 16:29, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
I'm more inclined towards Quondum's solution of an article that covers the existence and the reception of the theory, as we have good sources for that, but not the content, as we don't have good sources for that. XOR'easter solution is also sensible, though, the theory proposes to do much more but the reason it has been noted is the EmDrive. Tercer (talk) 19:57, 4 June 2021 (UTC)
I was thinking of how to encapsulate the claims, but every time I try to read a paper by McCulloch I am freshly appalled. It'll boil down to a few sentences wherever it ends up, but it needs to fit the reality: QI is horribly audacious pseudoscience, so we can't present it in a way that it could be perceived as believable. —Quondum 21:46, 4 June 2021 (UTC)

Now at AfD. XOR'easter (talk) 02:14, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

The AfD has been closed as delete. XOR'easter (talk) 17:10, 15 June 2021 (UTC)

Request for Comment Robert Lanza

There is a Request for Comment about Robert Lanza#Biocentrism that may be of interest to members of the WikiProject: Bibliographies/Science task force. Talk:Robert Lanza#Request For Comment Robert Lanza. I would encourage members of this project to consider participating to add diversity to the discussion. Sapphire41359 (talk) 17:35, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

Template:General relativity sidebar

I came across this sidebar from a user asking to remove it from Riemannian geometry. It seems to have been created, almost in its entirety, by the now-banned User:Oranjelo100. I removed a couple articles from the template that didn't seem to make sense (for instance, phase space being in the list of spacetime "phenomena" of general relativity) and added Riemann curvature tensor and pseudo-Riemannian manifold for good measure. On a quick glance, there are still some confusing inclusions (e.g. doubly special relativity being a "fundamental concept" in GR) and probably articles left out, so having some keener and more knowledgeable (than a mere semester's worth at university in my case) eyes than mine to look over the template would be appreciated. ‑‑Volteer1 (talk) 17:56, 17 June 2021 (UTC)

I simply reverted it to last version before it was attacked by User:Oranjelo100, I think that's easier than looking at each individual entry, as they had made the sidebar huge. Note that the same user had also attacked Template:Special relativity sidebar, which I also reverted. Tercer (talk) 09:25, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
Some other templates they substantially added to that you might want to look at: Template:Physical cosmology, Template:Quantum field theory, Template:Quantum mechanics topics. ‑‑Volteer1 (talk) 09:49, 18 June 2021 (UTC)
I've reverted those as well. Some good work was lost, but the result was clearly a net positive. Tercer (talk) 12:09, 18 June 2021 (UTC)

Nomination for deletion: Multiple Planck unit templates

Proposed deletion of several misguided templates and redirects to them. —Quondum 02:08, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The 10 most-viewed, worst-quality articles according to this Wikiproject

Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Popular pages--Coin945 (talk) 06:32, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

The article classification is a bit outdated. Transparent wood composites is not a stub (why does it get so many views?), Radiation is better than start class, too. --mfb (talk) 07:42, 19 June 2021 (UTC)
Careful with these stats, there are some serious outliers (bot downloads, or whatever): pageviews.toolforge.org Ponor (talk) 09:07, 19 June 2021 (UTC):
Ideally there was a list that had the most-viewed stub/start class articles with daily views being within a standard deviation to weed out outliers from daily spikes. Perhaps you know someone who could make thar happen..?--Coin945 (talk) 09:47, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

@Coin945: it's doable, I've done it before; in most cases it suffices to remove the top 2 or 3 daily counts from the sum. Now, this list is updated by a bot and whoever runs it doesn't seem to be very responsive to improvement requests. Ponor (talk) 12:46, 19 June 2021 (UTC)

Tennis racket theorem

My angular momentum skills have dissipated so I'm asking for help with Tennis racket theorem which appears fundamentally correct, but which is wrong about at least one point, namely in where each greater-than should be less-than. This was raised at Wikipedia:Reference desk/Science#Principal axes of a tennis racquet (permalink). Johnuniq (talk) 01:11, 20 June 2021 (UTC)

European Conference Physics of Magnetism at AfD

This AfD may be of interest to the community here. The article was briefly discussed back in April. XOR'easter (talk) 00:18, 23 June 2021 (UTC)

Absolute hot

The seems like a candidate for WP:PROD, with a fallback to WP:AfD if contested. It seems to be just capturing the sensationalistic title of one of its references, not an encyclopaedic topic IMO. It contains only summary sections of two related concepts captured elsewhere, Planck temperature and Hagedorn temperature, and no content of its own. —Quondum 19:40, 22 June 2021 (UTC)

I concur. The only "literature" I can turn up is the occasional unpublished preprint. The term isn't a term that physicists actually use to any substantial extent; the existence of the article seems directly attributable to the headline of a NOVA story. XOR'easter (talk) 00:29, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
Thanks. PRODed. —Quondum 02:07, 23 June 2021 (UTC)
Someone deprodded it without providing any sources to back up notability. I've brought it to AfD: Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Absolute hot. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 20:11, 24 June 2021 (UTC)
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