Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive July 2022

Cleanup for The Order of Time

Would it be possible if an expert in physics cleanup the content section for The Order of Time? I added a contents section, but it's poor and needs clarifying, as I don't have much background in physics. I've also posted this thread in Wikiproject Books. VickKiang (talk) 07:08, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

SSH model

I just created the page for the Su–Schrieffer–Heeger model (SSH chain). The article could benefit more if somebody could create some images of the band gap/edge states. Any feedback is welcome. ReyHahn (talk) 08:50, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Sock alert

There seems to be a lot of similarity in recent edits to physics articles referencing Planck units and similar, for example at Natural units, when compared to a previously banned user who showed a marked persistence in this space. Note what looks like reverts to early contested versions, then (after page protection) the appearance of a new user whose edits fill the edit history. If this involves the same individual as before, early admin/checkuser action may prevent a lot of pain. I am merely bringing this to the attention of the physics editors here; I do not have the energy to get involved in what promises to be a frustrating process. 172.82.46.195 (talk) 19:06, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

• Ava Eva Thornton (talk · contribs)? I have undone their edits at the most recent page edited, Gravitational coupling constant, which was nothing but OR and meaningless information. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:18, 13 July 2022 (UTC)
• QuantitativeGeometry is known to make many consecutive edits, as TomStefano (talk · contribs) did at Talk:Planck units. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:24, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

  This looks like someone else; I'm not seeing any attempts to promote Espen Gaarder Haug. XOR'easter (talk) 19:58, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

  Agreed. Based on behavioral evidence (such as their edits to Kelvin), I no longer believe that this is a sock — QuantitativeGeometry socks typically make many consecutive edits to talk pages, not articles, and does not usually edit this topic area. Their edits to that article still need massive cleanup — I have already deleted a mostly tangential section about implications of the post-2019 definition. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 19:58, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure who this previous user was or why you're so keen on undoing my edits (which took a fair amount of effort and weren't based on any previous versions of these articles), but this is the only account I've had and from what I've read (e.g. the Good Articles standard) the impression I got was that Wikipedia wanted comprehensive articles, not just brief summaries, and quite frankly this episode is making me much less enthusiastic about helping to improve this website. As for making many small edits well, sorry, I didn't realise that was considered a faux pas around here, generally I find it easier to spot where to make tweaks if I'm looking at the main article rather than the source code.Ava Eva Thornton (talk) 20:29, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia, where we are always stepping on each others' toes!

Natural units and related topics are a magnet for crank-ish edits, and so people who have been around this project for a while can become prickly about them. QuantitativeGeometry was particularly active in that area, and there have been others too.

There's no rule against making lots of small edits in a row, but it does make following the changes slightly more difficult. You might find developing drafts in your "sandbox" page congenial; that's one way to see the effects of small tweaks, and undoing them if you decide you don't like them, before implementing changes in an article itself. That's how I've handled major revisions.

Looking at the section you added to kelvin and that LaundryPizza03 removed, it seems that you went in the direction of "Original Research", which in Wikipedia-speak includes original analysis and conclusions, and the invention of new examples. E.g., Another context where this relationship becomes intuitive is in the case of a pump or a water turbine..., or the dialogue here. That can be fine in a textbook, but it isn't generally suitable for Wikipedia. Anything said here has to be said somewhere else first. For a lengthier exposition on this theme, see here. XOR'easter (talk) 21:06, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

There was a subsequently blocked user Ahri6279 whose last version of Natural units was restored several times recentlty just before a page protection: see this null diff. That user also had a tendency to edit the same articles in small steps in the same way as Ava Eva Thornton is: see this. Note my notification. It is reasonable to assume that the old version restoring may be a sock (Ahri6279 had a habit of persistently restoring an old version). The connection to other behavour is circumstantial. 172.82.46.195 (talk) 21:40, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Ah, I remember Ahri6279 now! But their main deal was inflating Planck units with the Planck viscosity, Planck angular acceleration, etc. XOR'easter (talk) 21:49, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Yes. I may well be trigger-happy, but there are several similarities that, well, triggered me. They also showed an interest in the Summary table at Natural units. 172.82.46.195 (talk) 22:04, 13 July 2022 (UTC)

Deletion review of Łukaszyk–Karmowski metric

This discussion may be of interest to the community here. XOR'easter (talk) 14:25, 14 July 2022 (UTC)

Language around units

On the suitability of English on WP such as "The units of mass are kilograms" and related, opine at Talk:Electric field#Where is it customary to pluralize a unit? (rhetorical) - 172.82.46.195 (talk) 01:58, 22 July 2022 (UTC)

Lorenzo Iorio

Lorenzo Iorio has been transferred from draft to mainspace by User:Missvain. Xxanthippe (talk) 03:44, 22 July 2022 (UTC).

Hypernuclear symbol

I am beginning my Ph.D program at the University of Houston and am seeking to take the next week to go improve the article Hypernucleus and perhaps also Hypertriton. The only problem right now is that none of the Template:Nuclide family of templates currently supports the standard notation for hypernuclei, in which the hyperon(s) are identifed in the left-hand subscript, e.g. ⁷
_ΛLi
or ¹³
_ΛΛBe
.

Template:Nuclide and Template:ComplexNuclide already use the lower left space for explicitly presenting the atomic number, but Template:SimpleNuclide is free. Hypernuclei are too short-lived (comparable to the free Λ lifetime of 2.63×10⁻¹⁰ s) to bother integrating into Template:Chem2. Should hypernuclear functionality be incorporated into the existing templates using a new hyper= parameter, or should I create a new template called Template:HyperNuclide which is specialized for this purpose? –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 03:44, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

You could, but the number of article where you'll be using it is very limited. So you might simply write things directly with {{su}}, like ⁷
_ΛLi. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 03:56, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

References

"List of crystals"

List of crystals (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views) currently redirects to List of gemstones by species. I find this situation odd, since there are many crystals that are not gems and several gems that are not crystalline. Additionally there are other "crystals" like time crystals which are completely different classes of thing -- 64.229.88.43 (talk) 23:16, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Listed at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2022 July 25#List of crystals. Most crystals are not gems. Not a sensible redirect.--Srleffler (talk) 03:06, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Deleted via G7 -- 64.229.88.43 (talk) 11:26, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Bulk changes to pages on units

Anonymous user 172.82.46.195 (talk · contribs) has been making a whole pile o' changes to pages on physical units. Some of them seem justified, others... somewhat idiosyncratic? The one I have the most doubts about is on Planck constant, where they deleted an entire column from the table of values.

1. In general, folks might want to review the overall pattern - there's definitely been some pushback on individual pages.

2. I'm going to start a discussion on the talk page for the Planck constant about whether the missing column should be restored.

PianoDan (talk) 16:24, 25 July 2022 (UTC)

Quantum rate theory

I would be grateful for an expert opinion on Draft:Quantum Rate Theory. Should I accept it? Cerebellum (talk) 12:56, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

Well, it looks like someone else has beaten you to accepting it. As far as I can tell, it's not WP:FRINGE, but my goodness does it need to be clarified a bit. Still, I wouldn't AfD it, I would just hope someone with the appropriate narrow expertise (i.e., not me) cleans it up a bit. PianoDan (talk) 17:33, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

This is one of those times when the title sounds more general than the content. I imagine that the term "quantum rate theory" has been used to describe many different calculations — it would cover any use of quantum physics to calculate the rate at which a process or reaction occurs. There are copyvio issues as well; compare the transmission probability of individual quantum channels [...] at a given chemical potential state μ in the article with the transmission probabilities across individual quantum channels at a given chemical potential state μ in [1], for example. And the whole paragraph beginning The simplest setting is lifted from [2]. XOR'easter (talk) 18:07, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

OK, I redid the page, because the references look fine, but near-copy-and-paste text isn't something we can leave around. XOR'easter (talk) 18:32, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

The two-sentence article is useless. The first sentence just tells us that "quantum rate theory" uses quantum mechanics (surprise!) to calculate a rate (oh really!). The second sentence is picking an arbitrary field in physics - everything has rates somewhere. --mfb (talk) 19:54, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

If anyone wants to delete it, my feelings won't be hurt. XOR'easter (talk) 23:59, 24 July 2022 (UTC)

PRODded... but now at AFD for those who care. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 23:36, 26 July 2022 (UTC)

Categorization

Hi! I just wanted to discuss some categorization issues with certain sections, in particular the Quantum field theory (QFT) category, but this applies more generally, such as to the Particle physics category. My point is that, MoS stipulates that articles should only belong to the most specific category, with inclusion of the parent category being needed only when that parent offers notable things that the daughter category does not. In the case of QFT, this has a lot of articles in its subcategories, but generally these should not get the QFT category, despite being QFT topics. Their inclusion in QFT is indicated by the fact that they are in its subcategories. For example, the article gauge fixing should only belong to the Gauge theories category, not the QFT category, since the only parent category of gauge theories is the QFT category itself, so the fact that it is a QFT topic is implied. Bringing this up after a discussion with User:Xxanthippe about this issue. Not to say that all the QFT articles belong to some QFT subcategories; many articles do not since they are very general QFT concepts that do not fit nicely anywhere else. Some articles can belong to both a category and its parent, such as the Wilson loop article, which is a gauge theories concept, but has a notable application in QCD. But my point is that when there is a subcategory in a category that captures all the features of the article, it belongs there, and only there, not to its parent. So, I was wondering what other peoples thoughts are; in particular concerning the gauge fixing and Uehling potential pages which I would argue do not belong to the QFT category, since they are gauge theories and QED articles primarily, which presume QFT. OpenScience709 (talk) 09:17, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Surely we shouldn't imply that gauge theory is only a subtopic of quantum field theory, since classical E&M and gravitation can both be expressed as gauge theories. Most of the content in the gauge fixing article is classical (Coulomb and Lorenz gauges for classical $\mathbf {A}$ and $\phi$). XOR'easter (talk) 18:06, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Yeah I was thinking about this. The main issue here is that the vast vast majority of gauge theories are in a sense QFTs, or at least they are understood to be manipulations at the classical level.

This is a major problem with QFT; a lot of it is just classical field theory. The vast majority of QFT articles have sizable sections that formally are just classical field theory calculations. Whenever you just deal with just the Lagrangian, or at tree level, you are doing a classical calculation. The Standard Model is a classical theory if you just work with the Lagrangian, but I do not think it is necessary to put it into a classical field theory category. It could be argued that something being a QFT subcategory subsumes classical field theory to some extent. Classical field theory is more the tool in QFT, just how algebra is a tool in say differential geometry. Do you see what I mean? I do however see your point; not sure what the best solution is. Create a "Quantum gauge theory" subcategory? But then essentially all the Gauge theories articles would be in both categories, which is messy.

I just do not see how it is practical to split the Gauge theories category into its classical and quantum parts; and I do not think it should be done since the inclusion of classical is implicit in QFT (on Wikipedia and in academia). Adding Gauge theories as a daughter category of Classical field theory might be a good idea tho. Maybe making EM a subcategory of gauge theories might also work, since it is really just abelian Yang–Mills theory? OpenScience709 (talk) 21:16, 27 July 2022 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Kevin Knuth

This discussion may be of interest to the community here. XOR'easter (talk) 00:21, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

Particle physics article revision

An editor is proposing rewriting the article. His large changes have been reverted and we are discussing it at Talk:Particle physics. Input from other editors would be very helpful. StarryGrandma (talk) 02:34, 29 July 2022 (UTC)

FAR for Wind

I have nominated Wind for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Z1720 (talk) 13:34, 30 July 2022 (UTC)

RF redirect

There is a proposal at Talk:RF (disambiguation)#Requested move 21 July 2022 to turn RF, which is currently a redirect to Radio frequency, into a disambiguation page. Further comments welcome there. SpinningSpark 20:00, 31 July 2022 (UTC)