Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics

WikiProject Physics
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Thanks. — Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 09:33, 15 March, 2009 (UTC)

New taskforces.

I've been considering creating three new taskforces while.

• Biography taskforce: For articles about physicists.
• Publications: For articles dealing with publications, books, etc...
• High-energy/particle physics: For articles dealing with accelerators, lab facilities, theory, experimentation, etc... and anything related to high energy/particle/nuclear physics.

What do you all think?Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 06:25, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Having the biographies and publications in a seperate taskforce seems like a good idea to me. Developing these articles requires a very different approach from many of our other articles, so it would probably be useful to have access to them through a taskforce. I'm not so convinced about a HEP/PP taskforce, this is such an integral part of modern physics that it would be kind of hard to pick it apart from the rest of physics, nor do the articles really need seperate attention.

As somewhat relevant remark, I would like to note that the WPBannerMeta template used for the physics banner only supports 5 taskforces. So, any more than that would result in a lot of work for use. Nevermind that, it seems there exists a hook to add 10 more taskforces. (TimothyRias (talk) 08:34, 15 April 2009 (UTC))

My first instinct is that we should not create a task force unless there is demand for one and/or someone ready and willing to lead one. The concept of 'build it and they will come' does not seem to apply that well to wikipedia. On the other hand, if the creation of task forces (prior to a demand) has helped in the past or if there is reason to expect that it will now then go for it. If you want to add task forces there are other areas that could use some help as well. Personally, I think the greatest needs in our community are recruiting more leaders, peer reviews, and image editing. TStein (talk) 13:55, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't think creating the task forces will effect the activity in those areas very much. The main thing is that it will make organizing the articles a little easier. For example, it will be easier to find all physics biographies that need assesment. (TimothyRias (talk) 14:00, 15 April 2009 (UTC))

I am all in favor of having a page dedicated to these tasks. But does having a task force for these categories help or hurt? Has it helped or hurt in the past? I don't know. Would it help with cooperation with other biographical projects or other publications projects? Further shouldn't we consider merging both the biography and the publication task forces together as they are closely related and need similar skills and interests.

A biography task force would probably be best dealt with by the people in the biography project, and they could probably adjust their banner to accomodate it. Regarding the other ones, and additional task forces in general, I'm right now one of the coordinators of the Christianity project, and we're in the process of maybe trying to see if we can use navigation boxes in lieu of additional task forces for various relevant areas. If the members of your project can agree which articles/topics are of "Top" importance in a particular field, they could easily be placed in the primary navbox. Other articles, "High" for instance, will generally be more numerous and could be joined by other navboxes. Anyway, it's still even in the experimental stage over there, and there is at this point no guarantee that it will work, but it's an idea, if you want to consider it. John Carter (talk) 19:57, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Physics biographers are interested in different things then other biographers. I think it would make sense for us to have our own task force.TStein (talk) 03:05, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Oh, granted. But it is generally possible to adjust a banner to accomodate assessments for more than one group, including outside groups. I think the Military history project has done so, and I know the Christianity banner does so, because I'm the one who adjusted it to do that. And, the Biography banner is the only one I know of which has the BLP and other biographical factors built in. It would probably be rather difficult to add them all to the Physics banner. And "joint task forces" are already rather common, in some ways. John Carter (talk) 18:51, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

All taskforces have done within the tropical cyclone project were to help track statistics of particular categories more easily. It didn't attract new editors. Thegreatdr (talk) 20:14, 15 April 2009 (UTC)

Man, I am dense! For some reason, I missed the main reason for forming the task force: to add them to the physics rating template. (Or am I being dense still?) Was that information useful for the tropical cyclone project. In other words did it help the editors or was it book keeping for book keeping sake? TStein (talk) 03:05, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

It is nice to see how the progress in the various portions of the project is going. We keep a wikiscore for each section. Thegreatdr (talk) 03:12, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

(unindent) Well my motivation for the bio and pub ones is mainly bookkeeping. It would greatly facilitate bot-work (and human work too) as far as making sure they all have biography banners, listas parameters, etc... It's the area where the physics project lagging behind in terms of assesment, and gets the least ammount of attention. The publication taskforces wouldn't have a whole lot of things in it, true, but these are often articles that need to be treated differently than others, since they are not about physics per say, but about the impact of the publication, etc... It would make it easier to verify that infoboxes, ISBN, doi, etc., are presents. Again this is bookeeping mostly. I doubt we'd recruit much people with those taskforces, but it's not really the point.

The HEP taskforce came to mind as I'm mostly interested in that area of physics, and it seems like a good chunk of members have a HEP background. I'll admit I'm sort of on a "taskforce high" because of the success of the recently revived Fluid Dynamics project and the creation of the Glass taskforce, which is also much more active than I expected. One of my plans for 2009 is the creation of more taskforces like these two. But if people are against the idea, I won't force it down anyone's throat. IMO, at worse it helps bookkeeping, at best it improves the quality of the coverage and help to identify problems and missing content. Dunno what it'll do for recruiting. The best way to increase membership will always remain "manually" inviting people, both on and off wiki. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 05:22, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

Sounds good to me. I agree about manually inviting people. I had two (unfounded as it turns out) worries about extra task forces. The first was that it would help fracture the physics 'community', if you want to call it that. (The chances are that it won't have an impact either way.) Second there is a maintenance cost associated with the task forces. If it help bots give us better and more useful data, then who could argue with that.

It sounds to me that the publication tasks that you want to use bots for is a lot more general then physics and should have another home. Perhaps, biography? (I am assuming there is not a WP:Publications or something like that.) Any bots can then look for both the physics banner and the biography banner together on the same page.

The high energy task force is a separate issue. I am not against it, but what makes HEP so special that it should be singled out when modern physics, electromagnetism, classical mechanics, solid state, optics, electronics, engineering physics are not? Or are you eventually planning to pick a reasonable set of task forces that spans most of physics? Are we aiming so that every field can have a technical page to go to for technical RFCs and the like while reserving the main physics page for generic RFCs and PR plus community building stuff? Then there is the additional task of maintaining the membership list between the main page and the task forces. (Sounds like bot-fodder to me.) TStein (talk) 14:09, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

There is a second reason for creating new task forces which has been mentioned yet. A task force has its own talk page and "Wikipedia identity", so helps to keep discussion on a particular topic together. I'm sure editors who watch this talk page are more than capable of discussing the problems of biographical articles about physicists, but it is helpful (especially for non-project members) to keep those discussions together. The main talk page of a large and active project (such as WP:PHYS) can be a little intimidating for outsiders who wish to discuss a technical point on an article which isn't obviously in the core area: I know that I tread carefully when I visit WT:MILHIST, for example!

A separate identity is also useful when the task-force needs to collaborate with other projects. WP:GLASS is a good example of this: a physics editor can completely ignore it if they so wish, but someone from outside WP:PHYS who wants to collaborate on glass-related articles will know that the editors who do turn up at WT:GLASS are the ones who are actually interested in dealing with glass-related topics!

Based on our experience at WP:CHEMISTRY, I would suggest a single task-force covering biographies, history of physics and publications (BHOP). We don't have one for chemistry, but it is an idea that has been discussed in the past and we do have editors who specifically look after these sorts of articles. In the end, nobody at WP:CHEMISTRY has been bothered to set up a new page, and the editors concerned rarely seem to run into problems which need the help of the rest of the project. Physchim62 (talk) 14:39, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

In theory, it should work out in that manner, where the individual task forces are in essence their own wikiprojects. But it hasn't worked out that way within the TC task forces, with very little discussion happening within those talk pages and very few people actually signing up as editors within the smaller task forces. Thegreatdr (talk) 18:59, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

(to TStein) Like I said, I do plan on setting up more taskforces that would cover a variety of topics over the next year. What these are just yet I don't know yet, but I'm hovering around the same sort of division (EM, Optics, we already have Relativity, Mechanics, ...). There's an interesting suggestion for a combined Bio/Hist/Pub taskforce from Physchim too. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 18:44, 16 April 2009 (UTC)

If you create a bio/hist/pub task force can that be used to clean up some of the cruft in our lists of articles? Perhaps we can have a bot tag any article with both a physics template and a WPBiography template with this task force. Right now there are way too many articles to try to maintain and a good portion of those are biographies. (An example of this are the 225 start articles of unevaluated importance.) A task force for bio/hist/pub may be a start. The first step to cleaning up a really big mess is often to organize it. TStein (talk) 05:47, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I actually was looking into the how of this tonight. I think the best way to do this would be to have three parameters in the template (such as |bio= |hist= |pub= ) which would (for categorization purposes) be handled as three different taskforces. But the "homepage" of all three projects would be the same. What do you think? Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 06:21, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Also we would need to find physicists (and physicists related) categories and subcategories for bot tagging. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 06:22, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

Yes, it is probably a good idea to make bot request (probably for anomieBot) to add to missing parameters. For this we need a list of tasks so that all of them can be handled at the same time. Some suggestions:

• Add "bio=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are in the category category:physicists and its subcats.
• Add "bio=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are tagged with {{biography}} or {{BLP}}.
• Add "pub=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are in the category category:journals or any of its subcategories.
• Add "pub=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are in appropriate subcategories (which ones???; at least category:scientific literature) of the category category:academic publishing or any of its subcategories.
• Add "pub=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are tagged with {{WPJournals}} or {{WikiProject Magazines}}, {{WPBooks}}.
• Add "hist=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are in the category category:History of physics and subcategories.
• Add "hist=yes" to all articles tagged with the {{physics}} template that are tagged with {{HistSci}}.

Anything else? (TimothyRias (talk) 12:59, 6 May 2009 (UTC))

I've modified the request to incorporate your suggestions. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 16:40, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Astrophysics? {{Astronomy}} has a switch "|astrophysics=yes" that says that the article is also covered by WP:PHYSICS, a complementary with the inverse saying might be appropriate. 76.66.196.85 (talk) 07:47, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Nuclear weapons and the scope of this project

Recently various article on nuclear weapons were added to this project. Since I couldn't find any obvious importance of specific bombs like Big Boy to the development of physics (they belong in the realm of engineering, milhist, etc.), so I removed the banners. Clearly not everybody agrees with this since the banners were readded a day later. So, I am putting it up here for discussion to form some form of consensus. So, do nuclear weapons such as Little boy, Big Boy and their tests such as Trinity test, belong within the scope of WP physics? If so, what importance rating should they be given? (TimothyRias (talk) 11:36, 22 April 2009 (UTC))

I agree with you. Nuclear weapons are not physics. At best, the engineering uses some ideas from physics, so it is an application. However, it is true that some big name physicists, e.g. Richard Feynman, worked on nuclear weapons. JRSpriggs (talk) 09:35, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

(Disclaimer: All this is only my opinion, not some declaration of how things actually are.) Well these specific ones would be part of the upcoming history taskforce (see #New taskforces above), and so would all bombs with some kind of historical significance to physics (such as The Gadget). Bomb designs (such as Teller-Ulam design), IMO belong in this project too (although probably not the history taskforce). Specific nuclear weapons tests or weapons such as Chagan (nuclear test) or AN-11 bomb are cleary out of the scope of this project. There's WP:WEAPON for them (and all the other previously mentionned article as well). Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 06:35, 25 April 2009 (UTC)

I don't know what to say. I recently evaluated a number of these and I let some through, iirc, and removed some physics tags as well. Like it or not, physics is associated with the Manhattan project. TStein (talk) 06:10, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Convective available potential energy / Convective instability

Hello

Two articles (both previously in WikiProject Physics, now one)—Convective instability and Convective available potential energy were merged. Now there is a discussion as to whether it is appropriate to have the merged article recreated to describe the phenomenon in less technical specificity and in a manner appropriate to at least one class of interested readers. If you care, could you please review Talk:Convective instability#Fork?

Thanks, Bongomatic 23:26, 23 April 2009 (UTC)

Quark nominated for GA

The quark article is has been nominated as a good article. It would be nice if somebody who hasn't worked on the article could review it. Thanks. (Note that any established user can review GA articles! So, if you'v never done so go for it.) (TimothyRias (talk) 10:38, 24 April 2009 (UTC))

Turbulence

The turbulence article is a mess at the moment, see here. For the time being, I reverted to a version of 8 March, and would very much appreciate help to sort things out. -- Crowsnest (talk) 10:53, 27 April 2009 (UTC)

Jet engine performance

Jet engine performance has been prodded for deletion. 76.66.202.139 (talk) 06:32, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

I removed the ProD. The reason for deletion was essentially that it was badly written. The article met none of the WP:Del that I could see. TStein (talk) 17:41, 30 April 2009 (UTC)

Magnetosphere of Jupiter

I nominated this article for peer review. You can leave your comments here. This article may be interesting for the Physics Wikiproject as it contains a lot of physics. Ruslik (talk) 19:49, 1 May 2009 (UTC)

Updating Spectroscopy articles

The research group I'm in is interested in helping update several spectroscopy articles. I want to start by working on X-ray absorption spectroscopy, but before I dive in, I wanted to make sure I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes. The discussion page directed me to this WikiProject.

My plan for XAS is write a good introduction (with pictures!) and divide the types (ie. XAS, XANES, EXAFS) into sections with brief introduction and links to other wiki pages.

Thoughts? Atenderholt (talk) 00:56, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

Go right ahead. Just make sure to respect conflicts of interest guidelines and read suggestions for COI compliance and there shouldn't be any problem. There's a quick help table on this project's main page if you get confused. You could also get WikiProject Chemistry involved if that's not already done. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 01:17, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

squashed entanglement

Is squashed entanglement a valid topic? I don't know anything about the subject but it looks like it might be a vanity article. 67.122.209.126 (talk) 21:46, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

PROD'ing since no response. 67.122.209.126 (talk) 19:49, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Hauke Harder

The article about German composer Hauke Harder is currently discussed for deletion. Harder also worked in the field of molecular spectroscopy before becoming a professional artist, lists of his publications can be found here and here. Maybe someone more into science than me can point out his work in one or two sentences, as I think he is certainly notable. Thank you. --Avant-garde a clue-hexaChord² 22:03, 2 May 2009 (UTC)

"Statistical mechanics" or "statistical thermodynamics"?

The way that the merge of statistical thermodynamics into statistical mechanics was carried out made the article very unclear. Only one of the terms is actually defined and the article keeps switching between them. I have already posted a comment at Talk:Statistical mechanics#Mechanics or thermodynamics?, but since neither of the talk pages (Talk:Statistical mechanics, Talk:Statistical thermodynamics) has been modified for more than 4 months and the article is marked as Top-importance, I'm posting this here too to try to attract attention. Brian Jason Drake 05:08, 3 May 2009 (UTC)

AfD alert Solid-state ionics

This AfD (Article for Deletion) was closed at 19:46, 8 May 2009 (UTC). The result was keep. Brian Jason Drake 06:58, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

No, I'm not kidding. The justification is that there is an article already on Fast ion conductors so the field of solid state ionics should be redirected to fast ion conductors, because, the latter has a more substantial article. No, I'm not kidding. You know en.wiki has some really great physics articles, many physics editors go out of their way to explain concepts well to the layman, much better than in every other science area on en.wiki as far as I can see, but some major articles are absent or improper stubs, and they readily become the targets of editors who seem to be nominating because the topic obscure to them and therefore must not be important. Both articles are certifiable disasters, by the way, and could use the most basic of help--no research necessary, just the least you know will be more than what is there. I edited a sentence or two, but it's beyond my time right now. Thanks. --KP Botany (talk) 03:19, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

Personally, I am in favor of merging and redirecting stubs into very closely related articles, or the article into the stub if the name is better. After reading the two articles--from an outside perspective, though--I don't see what is wrong with merging the two articles until enough is written about one or the other to split it out. If I could figure out what each article was trying to say I would do it myself. (It seems easiest to me to add a fast ion conductor section in solid state ionics then paste the, admittedly disasterous, fast ion conductor article there. Some parts then can be moved up. It wouldn't be terribly much better, but it would have more related information in the same spot and you would not lose any information.)

I agree with you in that it irritates me as well the way some people use a blunt instrument like deletion when the more surgical precision of merging and redirects is needed.TStein (talk) 05:08, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

I would rather see a better article on Solid state ionics written, than do anything with the fast ion conductor article. The former is more important, and the latter could rest comfortably in it until it were better, if there were a usable solid state ionics article, which there isn't. It always surprises me how little effort people who think they are otherwise capable of editing an encyclopedia make to see if something is an important topic when it's something they simply don't understand. It's rampant on en.wiki, not so bad on the European wikis that I have seen--maybe fewer Simpsons's fans?

A merger would be inappropriate, in my opinion, for that very reason, the the way to merge would be to merge the fast ion conductor article into the solid state ionics article, if either way, and the solid state ionics article is in no state to carry its own weight much less that of another article. Both are huge topics, though, with plenty of general and scientific literature for writing the articles.

Because I write mostly taxa articles I'm not afraid of a stub, particularly as a place holder for something major.

But the most refined instrument is to simply post at a wiki project and find people in the know. --KP Botany (talk) 03:16, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

I am not afraid of stubs; I just think they are, mostly, evil. They make it very hard to find articles that need attention. Worse, they make it hard to organize articles and to keep a topic coherent. Every article becomes an island and every editor is alone.

I still favor merging them into solid state ionics. Someone who is interested in reading one article is most likely interested in reading the other. An editor interested in editing one will be more likely to edit the other as well, increasing the editing pool of both. There is one less bad article and solid state ionics becomes a little less stubbier of a stub. It is not right to force stubs together where they don't belong. That is not the case here, though.

It is great to notify wikiprojects. Unfortunately, there really are not enough participants (at least in physics) to handle all of the solid state ionics type articles out there, IMO. TStein (talk) 17:16, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Just want to respond to some of the extremely bitey comments regarding this nomination. It is showing a lack of good faith to claim it was nominated because I do not understand it and have a "Simpsons" mentality (as if it is impossible to be a physicist and a Simpsons fan at the same time). I perfectly understand what the subject is about - I write mostly on electrical engineering subjects. I nominated it because there were two things in the article at the time, a more or less dictionary definition (which is not, in itself, a valid stub) and a plug for the Asian Society giving it undue weight. I could easily simply have redirected it unilaterally, but I thought it better to start a debate, AfD may possibly not have been the best way of doing this but is still more in the spirit of collaboration. I also note that User:DGG, who is an impressively careful researcher, has now agreed with me on the nature of the original article and has changed to supporting a redirect. SpinningSpark 19:13, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

Doubly-special relativity

Doubly-special relativity was prodded. I removed the PROD because it didn't qualify for deletion under WP:PROD since it had previously survived WP:VFD. 76.66.202.139 (talk) 10:13, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

squashed entanglement (second request)

Could someone look at talk:squashed entanglement? The article's original author (Superperro (talk · contribs · logs), who hadn't edited in almost 2 years up to now) contested the PROD and wrote:

Someone has objected to this page as being a possible vanity page because "almost all references are unpublished preprints." The preprints are in ArXiv. They can be accessed by anyone. They have a time stamp. Thus they are published. Publishing does not mean publishing in paper. I haven't seen you point out anything incorrect in the article or the preprints.

I defer to the physics experts here but the article shows some symptoms of containing original research. The term "squashed entanglement" isn't in the index of Nielsen and Chuang's book on quantum computation, if that matters. I do find some hits for the term on google scholar, mostly to more arxiv preprints. I left a request for better citations. 67.122.209.126 (talk) 06:39, 6 May 2009 (UTC)

Missing physics topics

I recently expanded and updated my page of missing topics related to physics and wonder if anyone of you could have a good look at it. It may be that some of the red links just require a redirect. Thank you - Skysmith (talk) 12:39, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Cool, thanks a bunch.Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 15:17, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Nice list. Thank you for putting in the effort to make it. I took a quick look at it and I will probably dabble with it a bit. Should this not have a home with the project, though? TStein (talk) 17:41, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

If Extension of the periodic table beyond the seventh period is correct that there's a limit to the number of elements, could we say why, tying it into Proton drip line or whatever else is relevant? kwami (talk) 07:02, 9 May 2009 (UTC)

Disputed and 3rd opinion request at matter

A dispute about the definition of matter and related concepts is ongoing. Outsider opinions are welcomed. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 22:09, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

The nature of this dispute is not clear. Headbomb has not identified the issues, nor opened a section to contain any discussion. Brews ohare (talk) 00:52, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Does your WikiProject care about talk pages of redirects?

Does your project care about what happens to the talk pages of articles that have been replaced with redirects? If so, please provide your input at User:Mikaey/Request for Input/ListasBot 3. Thanks, Matt (talk) 01:51, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

Definition of Matter

A long dispute has been simmering about the proper definition of matter here ff, without much progress towards resolution. I favor a definition ultimately based on the Exclusion principle:

"I continue to favor a definition based on the elementary fermion/boson disjunction, with no essential reference to mass/energy, which is a separate issue that all particles share alike. All particles share the same E² = p² + m² rule for mass/energy. But without the exclusion principle, atoms and the ordinary matter in our world would be utterly different. Notice how bosons composed of elementary fermions, like ⁴He, do occupy space, in the sense of the exclusion principle. And note also that there is no way to build a composite fermion out of bosons. These seem to me to be deep truths: one says we cannot make "matter" out of elementary bosons, and the other suggests that even composite bosons, if built up of elementary fermions, never lose their character as matter.

But I think that for the purposes of this article, the discussion should proceed from top (commonplace) to bottom (esoteric), starting with the familiar e, p, & n, which are the basic entities needed to describe 99% of the matter that makes up our everyday world. Every even slightly educated person should be familiar with these, and how they build up atoms and molecules."

—but no one seems to have been able to produce a definitive source, one way or the other. It may be that there really is no agreed-upon "correct" definition. If so we need to leave it as un unresolved loose end, I guess, and close off the argument until the wider community decides. But it seems that we could use fresh blood in this discussion. Requests for third opions have already been posted and deleted a few times. Thanks in advance. Bill Wwheaton (talk) 16:39, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

The matter introduction has been rewritten to take a more historical perspective and to avoid a "right way" vs. "wrong way" mentality. I believe all objections have been met. There has been no effort made on the talk page to refine the discussion or identify further debate.

There is no purpose in trying to discredit the everyday definition of "occupies space and has mass", which is very prevalent. This definition simply is supplemented with the (at least as) venerable "building block" definition, which dates back to the "atoms" of Democritus about 400 BC and is compatible with subsequent historical developments. Brews ohare (talk) 15:05, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Need help with classical harmonic oscillator articles

I stumbled across a mess of articles relating to harmonic motion, that desperately need reorganizing. I was hoping to do some of it myself, but I need more input. The first thing I need is to determine if I have all of the relevant pages. Here is what I found:

Harmonic oscillator,Oscillator,Simple harmonic motion, Damping,Resonance,Resonator,Parametric oscillator,Q factor,Damping ratio,Vibration,Mechanical resonance,Electrical resonance,Acoustic resonance,Torsion spring#Torsional harmonic oscillators,Oscillator phase noise,

The second thing I need help with is to ensure that I have the appropriate use cases I want to redesign for. The different purposes came up with are:

1. readers looking for simple information about SHO and Damped oscillator
2. readers looking for detailed information about the math
3. readers looking for a general purpose overall article with links to all of the harmonic oscillator
4. engineer's looking for particular topics such as resonance, q factor, etc...

Is there anything I am missing here?

The third thing I was hoping for is if anyone sees any articles in the above list that should be merged?

Finally, I was hoping for input on a tentative plan to fix this:

1. Make Oscillator general purpose article with a sections (with corresponding main tags) dedicated to Simple harmonic motion, damping, Harmonic oscillator equation,Resonance, Q factor, Phase noise, and Parametric oscillator
2. Turn harmonic oscillator into a page dedicated to the mathematical aspects of the classical harmonic oscillators by moving out most of the too simple stuff.
3. Move the damped harmonic motion stuff out of the damping page to its own home. The music damping deserves its own maintenance and should not be forced to coexist with the other stuff in my opinion.

Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.

TStein (talk) 21:34, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

You might add to your list Quantum harmonic oscillator, which makes inadequate connection to such issues as field quantization, normal modes and black body radiation. Brews ohare (talk) 15:16, 15 May 2009 (UTC)

Adding derivation of aberration formula to "Relativistic aberration"

I have been trying to understand the derivation for a while. Although there are some unclear points (for me), a source one of you have shown me is consistant, not so much difficult, and seems to give a good insight. I want to add the derivation, in some form, to the page, but I am worried about violating copyright, and if it is OK to rely only on the source. the source is http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0409/0409013v4.pdf. And I may need help with drawing pictures once decided to add it. Like sushi (talk) 12:46, 16 May 2009 (UTC)

Style manual

Is there some reason why the norms of Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics) seem to challenge Wikipedia's physicists? In the past hour, I have edited these articles:

• interference
• Hong–Ou–Mandel effect
• Quantum lithography
• NOON state
• Interferometric visibility

In interference, I found this:

$prob(\psi \Rightarrow \varphi )=|\langle \psi |\varphi \rangle |^{2}=|\sum _{i}\psi _{i}^{*}\varphi _{i}|^{2}=$ $=\sum _{ij}\psi _{i}^{*}\psi _{j}\varphi _{j}^{*}\varphi _{i}=\sum _{i}|\psi _{i}|^{2}|\varphi _{i}|^{2}+\sum _{ij;i\neq j}\psi _{i}^{*}\psi _{j}\varphi _{j}^{*}\varphi _{i}$

I changed it to this:

$\operatorname {prob} (\psi \Rightarrow \varphi )=|\langle \psi |\varphi \rangle |^{2}=|\sum _{i}\psi _{i}^{*}\varphi _{i}|^{2}$

$=\sum _{ij}\psi _{i}^{*}\psi _{j}\varphi _{j}^{*}\varphi _{i}=\sum _{i}|\psi _{i}|^{2}|\varphi _{i}|^{2}+\sum _{ij;i\neq j}\psi _{i}^{*}\psi _{j}\varphi _{j}^{*}\varphi _{i}$

The "displayed" TeX was not indented by a colon and \operatorname was not used (nor \text or the like), so that "prob" got italicized as if "p" "r" "o" "b" were four variables.

I found a number of TeX displays in which the period or comma at the end was OUTSIDE of the "math" environment. That is good usage when TeX is used in the usual way, as opposed to the Wikipedia way, but its effect within Wikipedia is that the punctuation gets misaligned and otherwise fails to match the text, and in one case I found the period alone on the next line after the TeX display (this last will go away if you vary the browser window geometry, but won't happen at all if you put it inside).

In several places I found -1 instead of −1. A minus sign is not a stubby little hyphen, and when it's in a superscript a hyphen can be hard to see.

In one place I found N=4 instead of N = 4 (italics for the N and proper spacing before and after "=" in non-TeX notation. (Of course, the "4" should not be italicized.))

I found this:

$Visibility(real)={\frac {max-min}{max+min}},$

and changed it to this:

${\text{Visibility}}({\text{real}})={\frac {\max -\min }{\max +\min }},$

(\text for text and proper indentation.)

I found this:

where max is the maximum of the oscillations (also called fringes) and min the minimum of the oscillations.

and changed it to this:

where max is the maximum of the oscillations (also called fringes) and min the minimum of the oscillations.

Generally in non-TeX notation, one italicizes variables, but not digits and not punctuation (thus matching TeX style), and one uses proper minus signs, not stubby little hyphens, and one puts a space (often non-breakable) before and after "+", "=", etc. (no need to attend to that in TeX since the software does it automatically). (And no succeeding space in +5 or −5, where the "plus" or "minus" is unary rather than binary.)

I prefer to avoid "inline" use of TeX in things like N = 4, since it's often the wrong size (browser-dependent, I think) and very badly misaligend.

See Wikipedia:Manual of Style (mathematics). Michael Hardy (talk) 14:36, 19 May 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the tips. I have read the style, but I missed the punctuation in the formula. I even changed a few of them for the worse. I will do better, I promise. It is too easy to miss the details. That is particularly true when you are used to writing papers for journals. I made the inline Tex mistake as well, for the same reason. TStein (talk) 00:49, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

I have a strong suspicion that it's mostly ignorance of how Wikipedia handles the math tags, combined with some who just don't care. I'll update the links on the project page to give some place to MOSMATH. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:54, 20 May 2009 (UTC)

Overhaul of list of neutrino experiments

I've recently overhauled the list of neutrino experiments, but many things are missing. If you could take a look at it and add stuff you know (or know how to find), expand it to include other neutrino experiments etc... that would be great. Thanks. Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:03, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

Likewise, I've greatly expanded Template:Neutrino detectors. If you know of more neutrino detectors, facilities, experiments, please add them (and if you can remove some of these redlinks, even better!). Headbomb {^ταλκ_{κοντριβς} – WP Physics} 03:01, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Gas Laws merge

I've just been editing Charles's Law and I think that the comments I have made there (linking needed) should be repeated at the sites of the other gas laws. Could these all be merged into Gas laws, since they are not very substantial articles on their own. (Gay-Lussac's_law, Boyle's law) Might be an idea to get WP:WPHOS involved too. A.C. Norman (talk) 15:46, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

If you are going to merge them (including Avogadro's law and combined gas law as well) then you also need to merge them into Ideal gas law. The problem is that some of the links to these articles are for historical purposes, but others are for physics/chemistry purposes. These laws are still used today. What you will probably have to do after the split/merge is sort through all of the links to the articles and relink, by hand, history links to gas laws and physics/chemistry links to Ideal gas law. It will be long and tedious I am afraid. TStein (talk) 18:01, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Hmmm, yes. I think I'd merge Charles, Boyle's, Gay-Lussac's, Avogadro's, Combined gas law into Gas laws. Probably it would be appropriate to leave the ideal gas law separate, as it is a much longer article and is more important in its own right (though obviously it could be mentioned briefly and linked to for further info - as is already the case). Presumably each law would get its own section in Gas laws, so could there be redirects to the section within that article, which would solve any links from e.g. chemistry articles. I think this might make Gas laws into a good article, which could touch on the historical development and the relevant physics, chemistry... I'm going to put up some "suggested merge" signs, to get some more discussion. A.C. Norman (talk) 19:18, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

Gas laws is a historical article; do the details that are necessary for physics/chemistry articles linking to charles law, etc. belong in a historical article? Many of the articles linking to these gas laws (Charles, Boyles, etc..) are looking for a simplified description not found in ideal gas law. TStein (talk) 19:54, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I (also) oppose the merging of all these articles. They have the right of being independent articles because they describe different principles and have their own history. They have several things in common, though, and these common parts could be described in an ideal gas laws article but with references to the existing main articles. I think that a bad example for merging too much is the Equation of state article, where almost nothing is left for the description of the single (but at least historically important) equations. Even the major difference between cubic equations and the virial equation is lost. --WilfriedC (talk) 23:02, 22 May 2009 (UTC)

I support merging those laws which are special cases of PV = nRT, as long as the historical laws (Boyle, Charles, etc) can be found with redirects. Modern chemistry courses usually start with PV = nRT and just mention the others as special cases.

However I oppose the inclusion of other related laws which are not direct consequences of PV = nRT, such as Graham's law (where you have also posted a merge proposal, and Henry's law (though it is mentioned in Gas Laws). Dirac66 (talk) 01:27, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

I also oppose the merger and agree with WilfriedC. Each of the laws is individually notable in their historic sense even if they have been collectively overshadowed by the ideal gas law and thermodynamics.JHobbs103 (talk) 01:43, 23 May 2009 (UTC)

Discussion about html formatted style for simple tex formatted equations

The many people who have the (I believe default) setting for equation rendering as using html for simple equations, have been seeing the equations as being too small relative to the ping equivalents. This is fairly simple to fix in the style file; although it may cause other problems, in particular with inline math equations. (Those should be removed in general principle anyway.)

I started a discussion about changing the font size for the span.texhtml element that is used for the html rendered equations at MediaWiki talk:Common.css about this issue.

• Current rendering of a simple equation: $e^{i\pi }+1=0$.
• Forced to render with png using \,: $e^{i\pi }+1=0\,$.
• One proposed solution changing style: $e^{i\pi }+1=0$.

I probably should have discussed it here and in WP:math or in WP:village pump (technical) but I got a little ahead of myself I am afraid. In any case I think it is worth discussing and hope to get your input.