Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive January 2019

Electron mass and Avogadro

There is some seemingly useless information about Avogadro's constant on the Electron rest mass article. May somebody verify its notability? --MaoGo (talk) 17:36, 25 December 2018 (UTC)

It is ok that the argument in the lead was erased, but what about the whole section about Avogadro constant and the electron mass? --MaoGo (talk) 03:06, 4 January 2019 (UTC)

Quantum eternity theorem

I recently watched Sean Carroll's debate against William Lane Craig. Sean Carroll mentioned "Quantum eternity theorem". I came to Wikipedia to find out more, but we don't have an article on the subject. I have done a Google search, including scholarly articles, but I am struggling to find a clear description. Can someone with the appropriate expertise create a Wikipedia article, please? Axl ¤ [Talk] 11:09, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

As far as I can tell, that's just a name that Carroll himself thought up, and that nobody else has adopted to any serious extent. He says that the content of the theorem is "under conventional quantum mechanics, any universe with a non-zero energy and a time-independent Hamiltonian will necessarily last forever toward both the past and the future." I wouldn't even call this a theorem. It's just the statement that if you have a state vector $|\psi \rangle$ and a fixed Hamiltonian $H$, you can use the Schrödinger equation $H|\psi \rangle =i{\frac {\partial }{\partial t}}|\psi \rangle$ to roll that state vector back and forth by arbitrarily large amounts of time, into the future or into the past. It's not so much a "theorem" as it is a restatement of the assumption that there's no special point on the $t$ axis. XOR'easter (talk) 18:25, 5 January 2019 (UTC)

Many think that the total energy of the universe is zero with negative gravitational potential energy cancelling out other forms of energy which are positive. If so, this "theorem" is irrelevant. JRSpriggs (talk) 01:00, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

XOR'easter, thank you for that explanation. You seem to imply that "quantum eternity theorem" is not a notable topic (by Wikipedia's standard) and therefore should not have an article here.

JRSpriggs, you state that the conclusion of "many" people's thinking makes "quantum eternity theorem" irrelevant. This claim neither invalidates QET, nor does it indicate that QET is non-notable. Axl ¤ [Talk] 10:18, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

In my judgment, the "quantum eternity theorem" is not a notable topic by Wikipedia's standard. XOR'easter (talk) 19:15, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Absolute magnitude

There are issues with Absolute magnitude (C-class, high importance), see the discussion I started at here. For the past 14 years, the article contained WP:OR that is probably wrong, but has since been used in multiple peer-reviewed articles. @Tomruen:, who originally added it in 2004, has brought the issue to my attention yesterday, and we both are working on fixing it. We need help though! Renerpho (talk) 05:59, 8 January 2019 (UTC)

Ask for a review

I added subst:PR tag to the talk page of a recently much improved article : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Bimetric_gravity

When clicking "Natural sciences and mathematics" it answered "Wikipedia does not have a project page with this exact title. Wikipedia:Peer review/Bimetric gravity/archive1"

How is this possible ? This article has previously been rated in 2010.

--145.242.20.221 (talk) 14:25, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Microplasticity

Hello, I'm rolling through the orphaned pages category and came across Microplasticity. I was wondering if the concept necessitates its own article, or if it could safely be merged someplace like Plasticity (physics), under the Metals heading? I'm not very technically-minded so I'm in a bad position to judge. Happy to any necessary legwork though, just point me in the right direction. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:52, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Judging from the paper I added to the article, this is a topic that has been studied since the 1920's and looks like a likely notable topic. That said, this is a very short stub and could have better context if it was placed in Plasticity_(physics)#Plasticity_in_metals. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 22:58, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

I'm in favor of the merging. --MaoGo (talk) 23:21, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Me too. Xxanthippe (talk) 23:51, 10 January 2019 (UTC).

I've merged it, thanks everyone :) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 15:54, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Move request: "String (physics)" to "Quantum string"

There is an ongoing discussion here to rename the article String (physics) to Quantum string. Randy Kryn (talk) 12:27, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Blasius–Chaplygin formula

Anyone know if Blasius–Chaplygin formula and Blasius theorem are the same? Sunlitsky (courtesy ping) stuck a merge tag on them in November without initiating any discussion and I'm not sure they actually should be merged. ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:58, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

It looks like the former is derived from the latter. XOR'easter (talk) 03:12, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Premeditated Chaos, the first was derived by both Blasius and Chaplygin and is the first part of the Blasius theorem. That theorem has two parts, often referred to as the first Blasius theorem and second Blasius theorem. StarryGrandma (talk) 19:36, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

So...would they be better off merged as one article, or should they remain separate? ♠PMC♠ (talk) 21:17, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

References

I would merge them, personally, since they're both related, and not really independently notable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:34, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Agreed, merging will also provide better context for the formula. --{{u|Mark viking}} {Talk} 22:43, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

Me too (again). Xxanthippe (talk) 23:20, 16 January 2019 (UTC).

Done, thanks again for your help :) ♠PMC♠ (talk) 01:39, 17 January 2019 (UTC)

Announced "improvements" in article Coriolis force

Activities, addressed as a significant improvement, which I perceive as un-encyclopedic at least, start here, and are announced starting here. I do not want to interfere any more and maybe some arbitration is useful there.

Could someone have look at this, please? Purgy (talk) 07:39, 21 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Bimetric gravity

The deletion discussion for the article Bimetric gravity appears pertinent to the crowd here. XOR'easter (talk) 17:39, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Relatedly (promotion of the same guy by, almost certainly, the same anon IP): Talk:Black hole#Absence of central singularity according to new scientific articles. XOR'easter (talk) 16:10, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

The AfD for Bimetric gravity has closed with a consensus to keep and revert to an earlier version, which I just carried out. I suspect the page will need eyes on it to guard against POV-pushing and promotional editing. Maybe semi-protection would be a good idea? I'll leave that for someone else to decide. XOR'easter (talk) 03:20, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

And on that note, would anyone like to take a look at Jean-Pierre Petit? For starters, the intro has what looks to me like egregious overselling. XOR'easter (talk) 17:17, 23 January 2019 (UTC)

Debye frequency, round 2

Finally some additional comments have appeared regarding the merge between Debye frequency and the Debye model articles. Check it out Talk:Debye model#Merger proposal with Debye frequency article. --MaoGo (talk) 10:08, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Fusion articles not saying whether existing machines create fusion

Here's something that's bothered me for a while about our fusion articles (and not just ours, which is admittedly a problem for fixing ours). You can read today's featured article, ZETA (fusion reactor), and not find out whether it created any fusion reactions at all. It's clear from reading the article that the neutrons originally thought to be from fusion were (at least for the most part) not, but it's not entirely clear whether there was any fusion. (Note that "we don't know" would be a fine answer, but unless I missed it, that's not there either.)

Similarly, the tokamak article talks at some length about the Q factor, the ratio of fusion output power to the power required to heat the plasma. It explains that a Q of 1 would be some sort of theoretical break-even point, but you would need much higher Q values for a practical power generator, and talks about planned machines that hope to achieve it.

But there've been many many tokamaks already. What are their Q values? Shouldn't we see a nice table with record Q against year, or something? Or can we at least get a confidence interval that doesn't include zero?

I just think it's a pretty obvious flaw in our corpus of fusion articles that you can spend hours reading them and not be able to give a clear answer to the question, "have these machines been able to achieve any fusion reactions at all?". I presume that the answer is "yes", but it shouldn't be so hard to find out. Is there anyone who is competent and willing to fix this in the articles? --Trovatore (talk) 06:00, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Fusion != sustainable fusion. Q value measures the latter, not the former. --Izno (talk) 15:28, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

OK, point taken, but not my main point. Why isn't the information in the articles, and who's going to volunteer to fix it? That's my main point.

I would love to see a table with a timeline of various fusion machines (tokamaks, inertial, what have you) together with estimates of how much fusion they were able to produce even non-sustainably, and also their Q values. Are there any with a measurable nonzero Q value? If so, which was the first? Surely this information must exist somewhere? --Trovatore (talk) 16:29, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Fusion has been experimented with since the 1930s. See Timeline of nuclear fusion and Fusion power#History of research. It might be nice to produce a table or list of some sort. --Izno (talk) 17:01, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Quantum psychology

I just deleted a paragraph from Quantum psychology which was trivially wrong about quantum field theory. What remains appears to be an amalgam of everything said by anyone who has ever thought that quantum mechanics and consciousness are related or even analogous. I don't think I'll have time to do more with it, but maybe somebody else can. XOR'easter (talk) 04:52, 25 January 2019 (UTC)

Seems to be pseudoscientific and should be deleted entirely. 95.116.151.205 (talk) 15:39, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Theophysics

I believe the article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theophysics should be deleted. It seems to be pseudoscience. 95.116.151.205 (talk) 15:37, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I agree that the Theophysics article should be deleted. I checked google/trends and the term doesn't have enough searches to even get a trend line. J Mark Morris (talk) 15:44, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Google may not be a good guide in this case. It seems to be a very small, specialized subject within philosophy. Notability is going to be governed by the existence of academic papers and books that cover this topic, not a general Google search.--Srleffler (talk) 20:50, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Fair enough. I checked arxiv. No results. J Mark Morris (talk) 21:51, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

37 hits on Google Scholar (you need to put it in double quotes; otherwise you get a lot of hits for "J. Theo. Physics" or some such). My biggest concern is not the low number but that the article may be a bit of original synthesis, pulling together a bunch of things that their authors might not have described as belonging to an identifiable topic called "theophysics". I'm not sure it is original synthesis as I haven't tried to track down the various threads, only that it might be.

That said, the article references an interesting collection of starting points for further reading. It would be a bit of a pity to delete it. I'm at least going to save a copy for myself. --Trovatore (talk) 22:16, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

I see your point. I don't feel that strongly about it one way or the other. I'll change my opinion from "delete" to "neutral". J Mark Morris (talk) 22:39, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

Seems to be mostly some philosophy crap, so I'd look in philosophy journals if anything. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:54, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

A Google Books search for "theophysics" finds some use of the term. I have not reviewed the publications to determine which might be reliable sources.--Srleffler (talk) 22:11, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

My concern is that the uses of the word theophysics might be essentially independent coinages with nothing substantial to tie them together. If that is the case, then grouping them into a common article would be Original-Research-by-synthesis — suitable, maybe, for a philosophy journal, but not here. XOR'easter (talk) 01:27, 28 January 2019 (UTC)

It doesn't matter whether the subject is pseudoscience. It only matters whether it is verifiable and supported by references to reliable sources. We do have articles on notable forms of pseudoscience. --Srleffler (talk) 20:50, 27 January 2019 (UTC)

It also matter if it has WP:NOTABILITY. The article seems to lack notability. --MaoGo (talk) 07:58, 28 January 2019 (UTC)