Talk:Scale relativity

Article Update

Dear Wikipedians,

I made an in-depth update of the article. I’m not a native english speaker, nor a regular Wikipedia editor, so I hope you will forgive my eventual clumsiness.

I did my best to keep the article nontechnical and accessible to a wide public. However, many aspects of the theory are highly technical (especially using advanced fractal mathematics). I focused on explaining the main concepts, and showing how the theoretical predictions compare to the observed values. I provided many references, so technically-minded readers can check the details.

I left out the discussion about angular momentums, which I found was not very pedagogical, and maybe too technical. I preferred to leave space for more fundamental insights and results of the theory. Of course, if it could be better formulated and introduced, and if many of you think this section is important, please feel free to rework it and to re-introduce it.

For those interested to contribute, here is what remains to be done:

- correct English mistakes

- correct syntactical mistakes. The maths may not be very clean or standard. The article-rewrite was exported from a LibreOffice document (see [[1]]). I exported the ODT file to the mediawiki syntax, I don’t know how reliable this process is. I thought the existence of this PDF may be useful to know in case there is any conversion issue.

- mention and/or link scale relativity in other wikipedia articles (especially the ones where I put a link to the “main article”).

- more technical explanations, derivations and equations may or should be added in the future, especially for professional physicists. Ideally, maybe this should be followed up by splitting the article into two: a technical and comprehensive exposition, and an “Introduction to scale relativity” Introduction_to_scale_relativity. Maybe something similar to Introduction_to_general_relativity ?

I’ll finish as soon as possible to:

- update internal links within the document

- update links in Wikipedia (I gave the full URL instead)

- update the referencing system to match the one of wikipedia

Thank you for your attention, and in thanks advance if you wish to help.

Best regards,

Clementvidal (talk) 16:08, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Linking to Process Physics

I recently stumbled upon scale relativity and it sounds very interesting.

I wonder whether it would be appropriate to include a link to Process Physics here too?

PP is similar in that it proposes a fractal structure for space. Both theories would be considered 'fringe physics' too, wouldn't they?

Just a thought really Danwills (talk) 05:25, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Criticism

Scale relativity theory has no recognized value among physicists. Its reputation in France was roughly reduced to a mere mediatic phenomenon made by some popular science journals, spreading the myth of a genial discoverer... This myth was based on the fact that Nottale's writing ways made it practically impossible to criticize his ideas, because... his empty "theory" was a mere game of introductions and announcements, that did not present any precise idea that could be a matter of criticism. In other words, it seemed like "not even false". The few scientists that tried to examine what it was about, just gave up because there was nothing to understand there. So it required some courage and time to find and write down any concrete reason to disagree, in order to put any stop to the mediatic worship of this assumed misunderstood genius, which mosts scientists won't bother doing as soon as they noticed there was nothing interesting for physics to see there. Years ago I developed this criticism in French. I'm sorry I did not translate it into English, and I have myself other more important things to do in life than to work on this translation. Some other physicists approved my remarks, but of course as usual they did not take the time and risks to work further on explanations or to make any public mentions on this subject. Since I developed this criticism fully enough, which then appeared for years among the first few google results on "Nottale" or "Relativité d'échelle" (the French for "scale relativity), no defender of Scale Relativity had anything effective to reply but they just gave up or kept silent (except one that published back a lot of insults but nothing concrete); the mediatic enthusiasm in France for Nottale's ideas stopped, and it did not interest anybody anymore.

I'm sorry to see more people still waste their time with this non-theory, just because they did not yet examine the deep contents to see themselves that it is empty (if they know physics well enough for this, of course) and because they don't understand French. All what I can offer you now, apart from my references page in French that includes some English links, is this recent little mention about Nottale linking to my criticism. Other criticism: http://antispirituality.net/nottale-scale-relativity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.222.83.40 (talk) 10:54, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

One more thing: why did not this article link to the French equivalent ? To not let visitors be aware of the bad reputation of this "theory" in France, through the inclusions of the criticism motives to the French version of the article that nobody dared to edit away ? Okay, I'll do this now. --Spoirier (talk) 00:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Comment on the comment above

I definitely disagree with the comment above. Mathematically scale relativity is no more wrong than Leibniz. With some work most of the statements cab be made precise as already demonstrated by several authors. If there is interest I can elaborate further. It seems that the above author has no scientific credibility and a personal streak at attacking Nottale.

Bekenstein Bound?

How does scale relativity deal with the Bekenstein bound? 70.247.168.170 (talk) 03:44, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Non-NPOV and other issues

Validity of the subject aside, it's written in a distinctly unencyclopedic form with some subtle non-NPOV aspects. It relies on a single site for citations, and given the mention I've seen in the Talk page here and a few other locations, it seems like there should be a Criticism section. Unfortunately, the major criticisms are over my head or in a language I don't speak or read, so I can't get this started fairly. Martin Blank (talk) 20:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Related approaches

The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause.

For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.

--SSA7471 (talk) 15:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Tidying up references and citations

I have started to tidy up the references and citations here, so far initial preparation. A lot more needs to be done and for a while the resulting display will be inconsistent, with some items finished before others. Since I won't be changing the content itself unless I happen to notice a particular problem, there is probably no need to add a "work in progress" template. --Mirokado (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

The initial preparation added 4208 bytes to the article, but 10800 bytes have been removed already with a dozen or so citations more or less completed, so this exercise will clearly be worthwhile. Doing the first few manually helped me understand what was needed. It will be more reliable as well as faster if I write a "little script" to finish the job, so there will probably be a break of a few days before any more similar edits, but a nice long weekend is coming up... --Mirokado (talk) 16:21, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

The main tidying up is now finished. Source size was reduced from 127203 to 92219 bytes, a saving of 34983 bytes, a little more than 25% of the starting size!

The following citation is not currently used in the article, moved here in case we need it later:

• Nottale, L. (2003a). "La relativité d'échelle à l'épreuve des faits". Pour la Science (in French).

Some mopping up is still needed, for example adding more ISBNs, checking citation title capitalisation, adding the |language=fr param where necessary, perhaps I will return to this article after a break for a while. --Mirokado (talk) 21:13, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Discussion with SSA7471

Hello SSA7471,

You deleted entirely 4 sections and about 9 subsections of the article (-11,080 bytes). I didn’t see any reason for the deletion of sections “Singularity and evolutionary tree”, “Cognitive aspects”, “Sociological analysis”, or “Reactions”, so I re-established them.

Regarding the general justification of your edit “removed all content related to quantum gravity since that is just wrong and clarified the status that SR holds within mainstream physics & what SR really is (an QM interpretation)”, I think you do have an important point, that you already made in the talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scale_relativity#Related_approaches):

“The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause. For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.”

Although the matter gets more technical, to take fully into account your valid point, I added two sections about Nelson stochastic mechanics and Bohm mechanics:

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Nelson stochastic mechanics

At first sight, scale relativity and Nelson's stochastic mechanics share features, such as the derivation of the Schrödinger equation.

Nelson, Edward. 1966. “Derivation of the Schrödinger Equation from Newtonian Mechanics.” Physical Review 150 (4): 1079–85. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079.

However, Nelson's mechanics has been refuted, with mutitime correlations in repeated measurements (see: Wang, M. S., and Wei-Kuang Liang. 1993. “Comment on ‘Repeated Measurements in Stochastic Mechanics.’” Physical Review D 48 (4): 1875–77. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875.)

By contrast, scale relativity is not founded on a stochastic approach, and doesn’t fall into the refutation of stochastic mechanics:   “Here, the fractality of the space-time continuum is derived from its nondifferentiability, it is constrained by the principle of scale relativity and the Dirac equation is derived as an integral of the geodesic equation. This is therefore not a stochastic approach in its essence, even though stochastic variables must be introduced as a consequence of the new geometry, so it does not come under the contradictions encountered by stochastic mechanics.” (Nottale 2011, 265.)

Bohm’s mechanics

Bohm's mechanics is a hidden variables theory, which is not the case of scale relativity. In this way, they are quite different.   "In the scale relativity description, there is no longer any separation between a “microscopic” description and an emergent “macroscopic” description (at the level of the wave function), since both are accounted for in the double scale space and position space representation."" (Nottale 2011, 360)

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However the title of the section is: “Scale relativity and other approaches”. So, by definition the “other approaches” will be different from scale relativity! The purpose of the section is precisely to help the Wikipedia reader situate scale relativity in the landscape of options to unify QM and GR. There are two ways to try to unify QM and GR. To start from QM, or to start from relativity. Quantum gravity theories explore the former, scale relativity the latter.

Otherwise, I do agree that ScR provides a QM interpretation, but it provides also many other insights (e.g. at macroscopic scales), so it can not be reduced to yet an other QM interpretation. Regarding your statement “Scale relativity is considered fringe science by the vast majority of the physics community and mostly ignored.” It seems to be your personal opinion, and as such it is a NPOV violation, so I deleted it. I guess it's not obvious to give an objective definition of "fringe science"?

For information, according to Google Scholar, Laurent Nottale has an h-index of 32, and totals 4418 academic citations. This simply doesn’t qualify as ignorance from the physics community. But if you can provide secondary sources to support your claim, please do add them with a NPOV style.

I can understand this part of your comment:

“It's a common misconception that scale relativity is a theory about quantum gravity and as such is a competitor to String theory, loop quantum gravity and others. This is wrong. Scale relativity says nothing about gravity, classical or quantum. It's a spacetime theory about ordinary quantum mechanics, not theory about quantum spacetime."”

However, it depends at how you look at the issue. If you assume that quantum gravity is the only possible starting assumption to try to unify QM and GR, then you’re right, they are not in competition. They could be seen as competitors if the aim is to find a coherent picture of QM and relativity. For the purpose of writing this Wikipedia article, I’m personally not interested in competition, but more in an exposition of the landscape of options to unify QM and relativity. I have done my best to integrate your core points, but please let me know in this talk page if you have further ideas to improve the article.

Best, Clementvidal (talk) 08:05, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

singularity and evolutionary trees??

from other fields, one tends to be dismayed by the formidable mathematical-complexity of physics, that tends to discount any possibility of any useful contribution unless one has been dealing with the specific formulas & math for years on end... yet here, we can see an example that those from the physics & mathematical fields, may also, at least at times, be poorly adept in other fields as well, to the point of seeming as imbeciles... degenerated into little more than common cult-prophets, but that attempt their prophecy thru calculations, but that don't even have a few percent of the needed variables entailed, mainly from outside their field, to make such calculations! ...those from the evolutionary biology field, or general biology, altho 'properly-obsessed', don't seem quite as 'vastly-obsessed' with 'grand predictive models', of the future, everything, or whatever else, as these sorts, who seem to feel an uber-need for omniscience, totality, & congruence, even trying to apply their mentality to various fields in biology! rather than at least some contentment as well in the 'high-mathematical' 'present-value' & 'special-individuality' of what they observe, and keeping moderation in their obsessions... but, diversity in general, is special too, as well when it comes to 'scientific brainware'... (and we must remember, that these 'densely-periodic' and 'grand-ecstatic-fulminations' of theirs are good at raising financing... perhaps they are not random, are formulaic somehow, & follow some type of mathematical-law that biologists can help determine? ...as the physicists, mathematicians, & engineers are at least 'partially-biological', still? yes?? in these 'relatively-early' times???) ~yw

The very inclusion of Singularity and Evolutionary Tree in an otherwise purely physics related article is an absurdity unless you are talking about a Black Hole singularity and your evolutionary tree is about how stars evolve. The Singularity mentioned is about the postulated merger of technology and man and the subsequent end of Life as we Know It. The Evolutionary Tree mentioned is about the Evolution of Species and not other kinds of evolution (which word means "Change" and not much more - add vinegar to baking soda and watch as the mixture EVOLVES CO2 gas.). 50.247.247.81 (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Tagged as fringe

I tagged this article as WP:FRINGE. This all seems to be highly questionable, as some others have noted. It seems to be very closely wrapped up with Mohammed El Naschie, which should set off alarm bells, although I don't know for sure if that's simply because El Naschie has glommed on to this and such association shouldn't be held against it.

On a side note, for such a fringe idea, the article itself has way way way too much detail. I'm personally at a loss as far as what should be done with this, and suggestions would be very welcome. --Deacon Vorbis (talk) 17:11, 21 April 2017 (UTC)