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Scale relativity

The article Scale relativity is pretty amazingly bad. It is entirely an advertisement for a fringe theory that barely anyone has even paid attention to as such. The explanations of actual science are terrible, most of the references are to the inventor himself, the claims of what it explains are impossibly wide-ranging and grandiose, and the few criticisms aren't even reported properly. I'd suggest burning it to the ground, but it survived AfD in 2008 after what strikes me as a very superficial discussion. XOR'easter (talk) 21:27, 1 February 2020 (UTC)

There's nothing to prevent a 2nd AfD. Just use the old AfD template in the interest of transparency. Lithopsian (talk) 20:39, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Update: the article's main creator has reverted the stubbification of the page and been reverted in turn. XOR'easter (talk) 20:20, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Merger proposal for effective permittivity and permeability article

Hello, there is a discussion for merging effective permittivity and permeability to effective medium approximations. Best regards, Myxomatosis57 (talk) 15:49, 17 February 2020 (UTC)

Script to detect unreliable sources

Main page: User:Headbomb/unreliable

I have (with the help of others) made a small user script to detect and highlight various links to unreliable sources and predatory journals. The idea is that it takes something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14. (John Smith "[https://www.deprecated.com/article Article of things]" ''Deprecated.com''. Accessed 2020-02-14.)

and turns it into something like

• John Smith "Article of things" Deprecated.com. Accessed 2020-02-14.

It will work on a variety of links, including those from {{cite web}}, {{cite journal}} and {{doi}}.

I'm still expanding coverage and tweaking logic, but what's there already works very well. Details and instructions are available at User:Headbomb/unreliable. Questions, comments and requests can be made at User talk:Headbomb/unreliable. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:01, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

That's quite useful, thanks. As for expanding coverage, you should also add the predatory journals Scientific Reports, Royal Society Open Science, and Open Physics. Tercer (talk) 17:44, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Those are not predatory journals by any stretch of the imagination. Low-quality, sure, maybe. Maybe they need some additional warning, but they're not OMICS-levels of bad. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:46, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Scientific Reports and Open Science do have some serious papers, that's true, but so much garbage that they should trigger a warning. Open Physics, on the other hand, is purely predatory. Tercer (talk) 18:12, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Bring it to WP:RSN and if people agree with you, I'll implement those. I'd also don't know of anyone that considers Open Physics, by de Gruyter, predatory. Are you sure you're not mixing it with Open Physics Journal, by Bentham Open? Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:15, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

It seems that the purpose of that board is to evaluate sources that are being used in Wikipedia. Since this is not the case for the journals I cited, I'm afraid it would be a waste of everyone's time. As for Open Physics, yes I'm sure it is the de Gruyter one. I became aware of it because it a Bell-denier paper from it was being cited in the EPR paradox article. The citation was removed in a recent edit, so it's not an issue anymore. Tercer (talk) 19:43, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

One bad paper does not a predatory journal make. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:52, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

Are two enough? Maybe three? This journal is a Bell-denier paradise. Tercer (talk) 21:02, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I don't see that those papers are particularly egregious, rather than simply part of the debate on Bell-experiments. Bell-stuff is usually a few levels beyond me, however. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 21:32, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

I'm an expert on the Bell-stuff, I have published several papers about it. These papers are not part of the debate, they are egregiously wrong. Tercer (talk) 22:05, 19 February 2020 (UTC)

If I may ask a stupid question, what makes a journal "predatory"? Is it just the degree of incompetence of the editing? Or are they intentionally exploiting the desire of crank (person)s to get published? Or what? JRSpriggs (talk) 01:47, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

A predatory journal is one that is only interested in receiving money (in the form of Article Processing Charges), not in publishing legitimate research. Their peer-review is only for the sake of appearances, as they really don't want to reject a paper the author is willing to pay to get published. From the outside it is hard to know how the peer-review is done, so we deduce it from the quality of the papers they publish. If a journal consistently publishes garbage, we can infer it is predatory. Look at this paper, for example. Even for a non-expert it should be clear that it is nonsense. Tercer (talk) 07:29, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

"What If Quantum Theory Violates All Mathematics?" :D --mfb (talk) 11:59, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Yeah there's some problems there. Not sure if it's just Bell-stuff related where the editor is friendly to that, or if there's a wider problem. The main issue I have is no one (see WP:RS) seems to have commented on Open Physics issues. Because it's a got a decent IF, is indexed in all the databases you'd expect it to be, De Gruyter is reputable, as was the journal under its old name Central European Journal of Physics. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 13:13, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

I think the reason nobody complained about it is because the journal is so unknown. I searched Wikipedia for occurrences of "Open Physics", and found only three results that are not about the journal itself: one from the time it was the Central European Journal of Physics, before it went down the drain, one comment in a talk page about removing a reference to a crackpot paper in Open Physics, and one very suspicious reference in the Maxwell's equations article. Tercer (talk) 14:02, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

I'd be fine with snipping that reference from the Maxwell's equations page. At best, it's redundant. XOR'easter (talk) 14:46, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

WP:JCW/O9 says it's cited twice (as Open Physics), once on Mass generation the other on Maxwell's equations. CEJP is cited more often. You'll find those in WP:JCW/Publisher6#Walter de Gruyter. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 15:14, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Now it's zero. I corrected the reference in Mass generation and removed the one in Maxwell's equations. Tercer (talk) 16:06, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Moseley's law

Hello everyone, please check this user carefully because he's continuously spamming the whole Wikimedia project in order to massively advertise his pseudoscientific "work". He's not a true expert of physics nor of mathematics, and Moseley's law is still valid, with some approximations overcame with more modern methods, and taught in all universities as originally stated by Moseley for didactics purposes (he claims that he confuted this law in january 2020). He's not an academic and didn't publish any peer reviewed paper, he's only a cheater searching for some notoriety. Look at the quality of his original "work" here. --Cisco79 (talk) 17:00, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Not sure about cheaters and all that stuff, but this is self-published and isn't a WP:RS. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:16, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm tempted to revert to this version. XOR'easter (talk) 17:50, 3 March 2020 (UTC)

Photon

This article is subject to a review of its FA status. The review is here Wikipedia:Featured article review/Photon/archive2. Graham Beards (talk) 12:54, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

Interpretation of positron cloud chamber photograph

This photo is used in our positron and cloud chamber articles as it shows the first photograph of a positron's path; I think we need a better description of what it actually shows. Here are my conjectures, but I haven't found any confirmations:

• The thick horizontal line in the middle is the lead plate.
• The positron's path is the long curved line that extends from the lower left to the upper left; the straight line in the upper right and the two big blotches in the right half below the plate are not significant.
• The positron's path's curvature is due to an applied magnetic field that is orthogonal to the plane of the image.
• The positron entered from the lower left with high energy, resulting in small curvature, then was slowed down by the lead plate, leading to higher curvature in the upper left.

Does this seem correct? AxelBoldt (talk) 21:44, 11 March 2020 (UTC)

All correct. --mfb (talk) 07:39, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

That's correct. You can check the original paper, it is open access. It describes explicitly this figure as showing a high-energy positron hitting a lead plate and losing energy. Tercer (talk) 08:15, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Thank you! Cheers, AxelBoldt (talk) 17:47, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Michael Persinger

This article is... well, read it for yourself.

But I've yet to see an article so-deeply based on primary sources of a complete quack/nutjob/predatory nature. There's at least 4 predatory journals, plus classics like NeuroQuantology, Entropy (journal), and Journal of Consciousness Exploration & Research. There's certainly some WP:ABOUTSELF stuff, but the extent of it is mind-bogling, with very little balance to make it clear those ideas are completely without support in the scientific community. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 19:20, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

Yikes. It may not be as bad as scale relativity used to be, but that's only because it's shorter. I'd support a radical stubbification. The claims about "entanglement" and the like are so incoherent that debunking them would require lending them meaning first. XOR'easter (talk) 20:41, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

For quackery and hoax promotion, it rivals Jean-Pierre Petit before pruning efforts last August/September. We maybe need a [[Category:Quackery and hoaxes]] — Grand'mere Eugene (talk) 23:09, 12 March 2020 (UTC)

I made a first attempt at pruning, but I may have been too generous in letting material remain. Journal of Advances in Physics is another untrustworthy one. XOR'easter (talk) 22:19, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Added that link to WP:UPSD and the CIRWORLD/Rajpub DOI to the WP:CITEWATCH. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 22:31, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

Thanks. XOR'easter (talk) 22:58, 13 March 2020 (UTC)

A weirdly large number of references are to Perceptual and Motor Skills. I wonder what this journal was doing publishing on topics like "Wars and increased solar-geomagnetic activity". XOR'easter (talk) 14:13, 14 March 2020 (UTC)

I'm noticed that too and was wondering the same thing. Possibly a case were Persinger got cozy with the editors, and snuck in a couple of nonsense/non-topical papers. The journal wasn't really published through any real known publisher prior to being acquired by SAGE in 2012. Seems the one before that was some "Ammons Scientific" which was exclusively publishing PMS for the majority of its early life, perhaps alongside a second journal. Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 07:21, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

Acceleration

Eyes requested on the acceleration article. Despite several reversions, an anonymous contributor is insisting that acceleration is not a vector but is a rank-2 tensor.