Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive December 2017

Disambiguation links on pages tagged by this wikiproject

Wikipedia has many thousands of wikilinks which point to disambiguation pages. It would be useful to readers if these links directed them to the specific pages of interest, rather than making them search through a list. Members of WikiProject Disambiguation have been working on this and the total number is now below 20,000 for the first time. Some of these links require specialist knowledge of the topics concerned and therefore it would be great if you could help in your area of expertise.

A list of the relevant links on pages which fall within the remit of this wikiproject can be found at http://69.142.160.183/~dispenser/cgi-bin/topic_points.py?banner=WikiProject_Physics

Please take a few minutes to help make these more useful to our readers.— Rod ^talk 18:00, 3 December 2017 (UTC)

WP:AALERTS need some help on Community Wishlist Survey

Many of you use Article Alerts to get notified of discussions (PRODs and AfD in particular). However, due to our limit resources (one bot coder), not a whole lot of work can be done on Article Alerts to expand and maintain the bot. If the coder gets run over by a bus, then it's quite possible this tool would become unavailable in the future.

There's currently a proposal on the Community Wishlist Survey for the WMF to take over the project, and make it both more robust / less likely to crash / have better support for new features. But one of the main things is that with a full team behind Article Alerts, this could also be ported to other languages!

I feel this is particularly important to this project, since my work for WP:PHYS is what motivated me to come up with the idea behind WP:AALERTS some 9 years ago. I know I can't imagine the project with the alerts. So if you make use of Article Alerts and want to keep using it, please go and support the proposal. And advertise it to the other physics projects in other languages too to let them know this exists, otherwise they might miss out on this feature! Thanks in advance! Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 14:44, 4 December 2017 (UTC)

Biography needs more sources

I have posted a biography of LLNL director John Nuckolls. Based on the sources available to me, it is as if his entire career was the two years in 1993 and 1994. I cannot find anything about his early life or education. Does anyone have any other sources that might flesh out the earlier parts of the article? Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:58, 6 December 2017 (UTC)

James Raymond Lawson

Hello. I've created James Raymond Lawson. You may or may not want to expand the article, especially by adding more about his research in Physics.Zigzig20s (talk) 13:48, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

I think is no longer a stub. MaoGo (talk) 14:12, 9 December 2017 (UTC)

Free electron model

A few months ago I edited and added a more rigorous paragraph about the ideas of the model and the inaccuracies. Everything else was originally in the article but it is not relevant! I mean, the ideas of plane waves, plasma frequency and Fermi energy are related to the model, but none of them are a specific result of the free electron model. Additionally, is too much math and derivation for non direct related subjects. I propose to eliminate them for the moment. MaoGo (talk) 12:30, 30 November 2017 (UTC)

I now understand what happened with this article. The article for Fermi gas should include the kind of calculations that appear in the Free electron model, as they are related to the Electron gas which is not a Wikipedia article. The free electron model speaks about transport properties of metals (conduction, Hall effect) starting from the electron gas. Some clarification and redistribution must be performed. MaoGo (talk) 10:53, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Conservation of mass article is extremely bad

See talk. http://en.wiki.x.io/wiki/Talk:Conservation_of_mass#This_article_has_been_wrong_since_1905

It needs considerably rewrite or deletion. In this state it's a misleading collection of misinformation.

92.196.123.224 (talk) 15:48, 12 December 2017 (UTC)

I did several modifications, is it better? Some additional work has to be done for the generalization part. MaoGo (talk) 16:56, 14 December 2017 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of P-adic quantum mechanics

The article P-adic quantum mechanics has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

This seems a hoax, or at least a WP:fringe theory: Although this is asserted to be related to physics, this seems, at least, highly conjectural. The mathematics in this article seem to be written by a guy who has heard about many deep mathematics theories, but has never really understood any of them. This article has the same creator as Mathematics of radio engineering, which has recently been prodded by another editor, and the concerns appearing in Talk:Mathematics of radio engineering apply also to this article.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. D.Lazard (talk) 10:25, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

It's definitely a topic, in that people have mixed p-adic numbers into quantum physics for one reason or another. (To pick a few examples by people whose names I recognized for their work on other things: [1][2][3][4]. There's also a brief discussion in Adler's Quaternionic Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Fields on exactly how p-adic quantum mechanics is more strange than trying to do quantum mechanics with quaternions.) But it's very hard to tell what this article is talking about. XOR'easter (talk) 16:47, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

The use of p-adic numbers in physics and in string theory in particular seems notable. There is a book and reviews listed at the nLab entry p-adic physics. A recent review on Arxiv is p-Adic Mathematical Physics: The First 30 Years. Many things in physics with a tree structure in which the p-adic distance is a useful notion have been discussed from a p-adic perspective. That said, the article certainly needs a lot of work--it is a mass of synthesis and OR, an editor's personal perspective really. It is a candidate for severe pruning or possibly WP:TNT with no prejudice to re-creating a solid article on the topic. --Mark viking (talk) 21:17, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

I started cutting, in the hopes of finding a salvageable article inside the existing one. XOR'easter (talk) 22:42, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

OK, I cut it down to a single paragraph and overhauled the references therein. I think it's good enough to keep now. XOR'easter (talk) 18:14, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

Excellent work, XOR'easter, and good article rescue! You've produced a well-written, well-referenced stub that shows notability. The article should definitely be kept. --Mark viking (talk) 18:46, 23 December 2017 (UTC)

I fully agree with the last comment. D.Lazard (talk) 23:19, 23 December 2017 (UTC) (nominator of the PROD)

Glad I could help! XOR'easter (talk) 01:09, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

Proposed deletion of Mathematics of radio engineering

The article Mathematics of radio engineering has been proposed for deletion because of the following concern:

Serious concerns on talk page have not been addressed since 2012.

While all constructive contributions to Wikipedia are appreciated, pages may be deleted for any of several reasons.

You may prevent the proposed deletion by removing the {{proposed deletion/dated}} notice, but please explain why in your edit summary or on the article's talk page.

Please consider improving the page to address the issues raised. Removing {{proposed deletion/dated}} will stop the proposed deletion process, but other deletion processes exist. In particular, the speedy deletion process can result in deletion without discussion, and articles for deletion allows discussion to reach consensus for deletion. D.Lazard (talk) 10:29, 22 December 2017 (UTC)

I've tried to make it through this article twice, to see if there was anything to salvage, and I gave up both times. I don't think radio engineers really care all that much about Georgi–Glashow grand unified theory. I don't doubt that a reasonable article could be written under that title, but I strongly suspect the current one is not a good starting point for the attempt. XOR'easter (talk) 01:19, 24 December 2017 (UTC)

I noticed that the article was de-PRODed, but it was still very hard to tell where the idiosyncratic history stopped and the WP:SYNTH began. So, I did another drastic cutting job. XOR'easter (talk) 19:02, 27 December 2017 (UTC)