Portal talk:Physics

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Featured portal The Physics Portal is a featured portal, which means it has been identified as one of the best portals on Wikipedia. If you see a way this portal can be updated or improved without compromising previous work, please feel free to contribute.
January 29, 2007 Featured portal candidate Promoted
This is the talk page for the physics portal. For queries about this portal, you're at the right page. For general queries about physics, please ask at the Reference Desk. For queries about Wikipedia articles on physics, please ask at the Physics WikiProject.
This talk page is for discussing improvements to the Portal about Physics; content disputes should take place on the appropriate article's talk page.

Please ensure this portal's details are listed in the Portal directory and its status is assessed.

For discussion about Portals generally, please see the WikiProject on Portals.
WikiProject Physics This page is within the scope of WikiProject Physics, which collaborates on articles related to physics.


Contents

[edit] Old discussions

--Dataphiliac 22:08, 30 October 2005 (UTC)Anonymous user, perhaps you are working in a different resolution than I am and my length settings look bad for you, or is there another reason for your edits? --MarSch 09:45, 27 May 2005 (UTC)

There seems to be no reason to create a blank field - alignment/layout should not constitute the creation of one and should be added only if information is intended to be added directly. --User: 24.253.120.206

I'm using the Firefox browser v1.0 and it seems to have trouble renderizing the wikinews. Has anyone experienced the same thing?

--GTubio 21:32, 15 Jun 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Featured article

It's gone more than a month now, I'm switching FA now. Let's keep track of those that have been. — Sverdrup 20:24, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Good idea. +sj + 28 June 2005 20:15 (UTC)
Here's some anniversaries in our FAs that we could celebrate by featuring here:
The current physics FAs that haven't been recently featured and aren't on the above list are:
Hopefully this'll get the ball rolling on picking new ones. — Laura Scudder | Talk 07:05, 27 October 2005 (UTC)
I've added some of this to Portal:Physics/Past featured articles. Karol 10:41, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Past featured articles

Shouldn't we move the above to lists to separate pages, Portal:Physics/features or something. When people start discussing things on this talk page, they'll get lost. Karol 06:33, 28 October 2005 (UTC)
I agree. It could get confusing. Updated the DYK, by the way. I'm having troubles uploading pictures though, maybe one of you can find something relavent? --Dataphiliac 01:33, 30 October 2005 (UTC)
OK, I'm simply putting the list at Portal:Physics/Past featured articles. Where can a link go? Karol 10:31, 19 November 2005 (UTC)
I'm also adding the infromation in from the previous section. Karol 10:34, 19 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Featured pictures and table formatting

It seems that using large pictures (350px+ in width) breaks the table formatting on lower-resolution machines. We should probably take steps to avoid that, if we can. --Dataphiliac 22:08, 30 October 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Wikipedia:Science collaboration of the week

Physical oceanography is a current candidate on the Science collaboration. Vote for it if you want to see this article improved. --Fenice 07:18, 8 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Radiaiton, an article needed

This is an article request for Radiation. At the moment it is a disambiguation page, but I think something so fundamental needs an article. Even a couple of lines would be good, I'm sure other good encyclopedias have dedicated "Radiation" aritcles. You can move the disambigaution page to Radiation (disambiguation), or I'll do that for you.--Commander Keane 05:30, 10 January 2006 (UTC)

[edit] "Topics in Physics"

Hi folks, I just had a suggestion. Can someone whose expertise is Physics create a table of “Topics in Physics” just like what Mathematics Portal currently has. I think that table is awesome in showing a general view of the disciplines within Mathematics to the users. I think Physics Portal needs the same thing. Thanks.

what is software Engineering?

I think there is something close to that in Physics, but this might be a chance to include things like "math lab", that physicists might not consider fields of physics.

What I came here to say is that it seems that the word "physics" at the top should be a link to the main physics page, but I don't at present know enough about the purpose of this page to make that change myself. David R. Ingham 02:07, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Contents list

It's a real eyesore, is there a way to fix it (or otherwise remove it)? Neither of the "edit" links nearby seem to allow me to edit it, it it done in some other way?

It should be gone now. Not sure what change introduced it, but I didn't like it either. — Laura Scudder ☎ 15:34, 13 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] List of Major Findings by Date

Can someone list the major achievements of physics and their dates. I'm particular curious to see a major accomplishments of the past 25 years... —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 67.188.97.139 (talk • contribs) 01:53, 27 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Colour Scheme

The blue doesn't really work, seeing as the blue hyperlinks are hard to read. Maybe the background could be changed. . . some pastel colour? Arcette 03:11, 11 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] The review of Physics continues at Talk:Physics/wip

Some time ago a group of editors set up a "work in progress" page (at Talk:Physics/wip) to hammer out a consensus for the Physics article, which for too long had been in an unstable state. Discussion of the lead for the article has taken a great deal of time and thousands of words. The definitional and philosophical foundations seem to cause most headaches; but progress has been made. Why not review some of the proposals for the lead material that people are putting forward, or put forward your own, or simply join the discussion? The more contributors the better, for a consensus. – Noetica 01:52, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

Update: Concrete proposals have now been put forward, arising from recent discussion aimed at producing a stable and consensual lead section for the Physics article. We have set up a straw poll, for comments on the proposals. Why not drop in at Talk:Physics/wip, and have your say? The more the better! – Noetica 22:37, 13 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Need Help

There is an article, Aryabhata's relativity principle which is up for AfD. While I think that the article is poorly worded, it seems to me that the basic information is sound. It's just that pop-culture associations with the term "relativity" creates the misconception that Aryabhatta came up with Einsteinian relativity (whereas here he is talking about a qualitative form of Galilean Relativity). See this eprint paper here, and my response to the AfD [1].I think that the article (title included) needs a major rewrite but the basic information is sound.What do you think?Hkelkar 08:33, 22 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Faster Than Light

I think this page Faster-than-light needs some serious improvements! I have fixed a few of the most glaring things. Rotiro 03:51, 11 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Simple Introduction

Some science articles are starting to produce introductory versions of themselves to make them more accessible to the average encyclopedia reader. You can see what has been done so far at special relativity, general relativity and evolution, all of which now have special introduction articles. These are intermediate between the very simple articles on Simple Wikipedia and the regular encyclopedia articles. They serve a valuable function in producing something that is useful for getting someone up to speed so that they can then tackle the real article. Those who want even simpler explanations can drop down to Simple Wikipedia. What do you think?--Filll 23:02, 12 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Physics as FP?

It seems that this portal has quite a lot of new content presented every week, and I must say that it generally appears as a great introduction to the field of physics. Shouldn't we try to make it a featured portal? Snailwalker | talk 13:19, 15 December 2006 (UTC)

I've done a serious amount of work on the portal over the last few days, and am now nominating it to be a Featured Portal. The nomination is linked to in the bar at the top of this page. Mike Peel 21:18, 25 December 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Appeal to restart the improvement process at physics

As you might know, there has been a slow article improvement process ongoing for the last few months at Talk:Physics/wip. One of the tasks understaken was a "vote" on several proposed leads for physics at Talk:Physics/wip/leadvote. However, the process has ground down to a halt. We need input and possibly a moderator to assist us.--Filll 15:30, 25 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Some trouble at Zero-point field

which was and most likely should be again a redirect to vacuum state. Now it has become a strange mixture of history of QM, Haisch-cruft and worse. See tal page. --Pjacobi 16:40, 16 May 2007 (UTC)

[edit] d'Alembert's principle

Are their two principles named after d'Alembert?

My (German) books on theoretical mechanics only know the one about Zwangskräfte (constrain forces): Forces caused by system constraints don't do work for virtual displacements of the system.

But our article also talks about one about Scheinkräfte (fictious/inertial forces). Is this a common nomenclature in literature (which?) or is this only caused by the article in the Britannica, which explains is this way? Perhaps one of the few cases where the Britannica got something wrong?

Pjacobi 11:59, 27 May 2007 (UTC)

Without digging into it, my references show the d'Alembert's principle article is following Herbert Goldstein's Classical Mechanics(1950) pp 14-16, 30, 305. Britannica's Micropædia entry does not disagree with the article either, in that no second principle is mentioned. Meriam's Dynamics p175 ISBN 0-471-59601-9 states the same thing as the article. It appears that there is but one d'Alembert's principle. Goldstein notes that James Bernoulli first thought of the idea, and that d'Alembert developed it further. The statement about the engineering textbook (like Meriam) might be modified to say "application of d'Alembert's principle", which is how I would have interpreted it anyway. --Ancheta Wis 15:04, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Perhaps I'm confused. I'll have to look into some English textbooks in the library. I've tried to outline the discrepancy between the article and Landau/Lifschitz on Talk:d'Alembert's principle. --Pjacobi 18:15, 27 May 2007 (UTC)
Orders of magnitude
area
angular velocity
charge
currency
data
density
energy
frequency
length
magnetic flux density
mass
numbers
power
pressure
specific energy density
specific heat capacity
speed
temperature
time
volume
Conversion of units
physical unit
SI
SI base unit
SI derived unit
SI prefix
Planck units

[edit] Standardizing unit systems and conventions

It's quite annoying to navigate through links on wikipedia and finding that each page has it's own conventions, units, metrics, etc... I think it's probably the time to suggest some preferred ones and impose them as an etiquette rule or something. It would clearly improve the utility of wikipedia's articles about physics.

Let me be the first to suggest the use of international system of units and the metric diag(ημν) = ( − 1,1,1,1).

I hope this is the correct place for making this kind of suggestion...

Oppose. Physics did not start with SI. Each new field evolves its own units of measure: for example, when the nuclear magnetic moment of the proton was first measured, it was anticipated to be 1.0 nuclear magneton, but was first measured to be 2.785 +/- 0.02 nuclear magneton[1] in 1939 by I. I. Rabi. In my opinion, these values are more illuminating than the SI value. In each field, we evolve and use the natural units, which of course are expressed symbolically in terms of the fundamental constants. These don't necesarily mean SI values, which serve only convention, and which do not necessarily improve our insight. --Ancheta Wis 03:31, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
  1. ^ John S. Rigdon Rabi p. 115.


What are you against of, SI or the whole idea of standardizing conventions on wikipedia pages? Would you really use as a textbook or reference book one that on each chapter or even each page changed the units or its conventions? I don't think so...
I know SI units are not the best fitted for doing theoretical physics, sure they don't give so much insight about the physics involved as natural units, for example. But following one convention seems to be necessary. And SI units are the de facto standard on many textbooks.
It's still posible to cite the equations in other typical systems used on that field in the same page.
Added a handy table of links to the multifarious units one might encounter. They typically include the range of values and orders of magnitude, which are basic to the science. --Ancheta Wis 15:39, 2 June 2007 (UTC)
I agree. There is a tremendous amount of overlap here due to the use of lack of standard language. I think in principle wikipedia should try to follow the conventions established in 1987 by IUPAP in the Red Book. However, that one is twenty years old now. It uses the word permittivity and relative permittivity. Here on wp, relative permittivity redirects to dielectric constant. The redirect is in agreement with the terminology most researchers now seem to use. But there is tremendous overlap between these two articles, and with other articles like electric susceptibility , displacement current, electric displacement field, polarizability, polarization density where usage may be confusingly varying. There are dozens of redirects, sometimes to surprising places. So it is quite a mess.
What I think is missing right now is a separate article about [[ε0]], without anything to do with materials. There actually exists an article page ε0, but nobody is linking to it because wikipedia makes it start with a greek capital Ε. There is also epsilon nought, but that is in mathematics. CODATA call this the electric constant /Pieter Kuiper 09:47, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Lithium Titanate

http://www.altairnano.com/documents/NanoSafe_Datasheet.pdf

Someone want to make an article about it?

--84.61.38.191 16:18, 15 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Reference for nomenclature

With the chemists of IUPAC, I found a reference article about nomenclature:

It would be best if wikipedia conformed. I will start with an article about the "electric constant", and changing existing redirects so that they conform to the guidelines. After that there remains the problem of merging. /Pieter Kuiper 14:59, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

"Electric constant" may be used in photochemistry, but in physics and engineering "vacuum permittivity" is far more common (and is also used in your reference). (I do research in classical electromagnetism, and I don't recall ever seeing "electric constant". Of course, I'm a theorist so I usually set the vacuum permittivity to 1 anyway.) I would suggest using vacuum permittivity as the more universal term. —Steven G. Johnson 16:22, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
I am certain that electric constant is the recommend term in physics. See NIST as an authoritative reference. /Pieter Kuiper 17:16, 8 August 2007 (UTC)
See Talk:Vacuum permittivity: just because you found a NIST page that uses "electric constant" doesn't mean it is the "recommended" term. If you google site:nist.gov, you can easily find other NIST pages that use "vacuum permittivity" etc. —Steven G. Johnson 18:15, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

Please take further discussion of this particular issue to Talk:Vacuum permittivity so that we don't have to carry on the same discussion in multiple places. —Steven G. Johnson 18:15, 8 August 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Selected article/Selected photo

We have run out of selected articles and selected photos at Selected articles and Selected photos through the end of the year. I commented out the auto selector and put up September until this is corrected. Since physics is a very rich subject I would recommend going back to the once a week photos and articles but leaving off the year, so that they start over again each year. That way if someone forgets to put up a new selection we won't have a broken link to look at. I would suggest adding 10 or 20 ahead at a time and just changing them whenever to whatever seems interesting at the time. 199.125.109.27 20:12, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

I've now selected an article and an image for October, and when I get the chance I'll find some more for upcoming months. I'm wary about switching to a weekly system that repeats each year, as the quality of the articles here seems to go up and down over time. Plus, hopefully we should be producing at least one good physics article a month. Such a system might work well for the images, though. Mike Peel 19:05, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
New images and articles are still needed for November and December, as well as January. Currently still using October until new ones are selected. 199.125.109.136 21:52, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Help needed: Gamow factor

I wrote a stub about the gamow factor – some kind of quantum mechanics probability formula for two nuclei overwinning their Coulomb barrier (??). But: I'm not a physicist, I'm a kinda-other-nerd-type, (computers, astronomy, psychology etc..) so I need someone taking a look at it, and maybe give some hints on the interpretation of a formula G(η) = 2πη/(1-e^(-2πη)), that can be found at the second external link. I found this Gamow factor when pondering about energy formulae to be used in star modelling. Said: Rursus ☻ 10:33, 22 November 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Physics wiki

I am going out on a limb here to invite other wikipedians to take a look at a physics and mathematics wiki that I have been maintaining for about a year and a half. It is not meant to compete with Wikipedia, which I view as encyclopedic and meant to be accessible (in scope) to everyone. Rather, it is meant to be chiefly academic in nature. I hope that perhaps that some people would like to contribute to the project alongside their involvement in Wikipedia, and welcome exchange between the two projects (the wiki is also released under the GNU FDL).

The chief difference (besides scope) is that some form of accountability is required in order to prevent vandalism and the like, but other than that editing is open to anyone. Some immediate answers to your questions may be found here, though feel free to contact me. I hope this message is received in good faith --Lionelbrits (talk) 16:51, 5 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Relativity link disambiguation

For the record, I disambiguated the link relativity in Portal:Physics/Textbook#General_information to theory of relativity. It seems more appropriate to link the latter because it is a physics page rather than a disambiguation page, and it covers both special relativity and general relativity. I hope this change meets with your approval. - Neparis (talk) 23:56, 17 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Editing

I'm unable to edit the "Neutron" section. An "and" is missing before "no electric field". Can someone please help? Thanks. Amit@Talk 09:20, 5 January 2008 (UTC)

Fixed. The edit link is at "More selected articles"/"Edit selected article". - Neparis (talk) 18:42, 6 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Gabriel Oyibo

Can you keep an eye on this article. There were some strange changes in the last few days. Now the first sentence reeds: "Gabriel Audu Oyibo is a Nigerian mathematician who solved the Grand Unification Theory", which is not true at all. And the notability template was removed several times (1, 2). Maybe it's better to delete this article. I think no one would miss it, except for Oyibo ;-) --Ephraim33 (talk) 08:39, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] John Bardeen

The name of John Bardeen should also be included in the portal. Bardeen is the only person to win two Nobel Prizes in Physics. I have included his name in the 'General information' section. Masterpiece2000 (talk) 12:15, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Roche limit

Anyone here know what the Roche limit is? Roche limit has been nominated for a featured article review. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. Please leave your comments and help us to return the article to featured quality. If concerns are not addressed during the review period, articles are moved onto the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article from featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Reviewers' concerns are here.

[edit] Assessment of the Domestic AC power plugs and sockets and Nuclear fusion articles

Domestic AC power plugs and sockets and Nuclear fusion are both currently rated A class but both are quite poorly referenced. I think that they are worth to be nominated to be FAC, if better referenced. However, without additional references they should be downgraded to the B-class. Please help with adding missing references.Beagel (talk) 07:41, 1 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Magnetic water treatment

The Magnetic water treatment and Klaus Kronenberg need a look of an expert, who is not afraid of pseudoscience!--Stone (talk) 23:24, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

[edit] Chaos!

The subject of Physics is SO big, complex, and has such a long history, making a physics portal is truly difficult. Not to be against it; contrary I love the idea; a possible salvation for this failed math major. The problem is: The portal works agains itself, leaving the non-expert reader lost and confused.

My brilliant idea: "Founding Experiments". A List of crucial experiments AND THE ENTIRELY NEW FIELDS OF PHYSICS THEY INSPIRED. An ultra primitive starting up list: EXPERIMENT FIELD/THEORY -. Newton's prism experiment [light corpuscles] - bad idea not foundational -. Galileo's pendulum [Clasical mechanics] -. Planetary orbits [Keplers laws; Newton's laws] -. Michelson-Morley [Special Relativity] -. Precession of Mercury [General Relativity} -. Planck's Black body [Quantum physics] -. DeBroglie waves [Shrodinger equation] -. Electron/electron scattering [Diracs theories] -. Face of Alfred E. Neuman [String theory] .... with links to everything. I FIGURE MAYBE 100 FOUNDING EXPERIMENTS. OH YES, photo mass in MIT bell tower.... -Harry Wertmuller HarryWertM (talk) 21:41, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Ultra primitive list above needs a lot of work. Just a start. HarryWertM (talk) 21:44, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

I like the idea. Beast of traal T C _ 03:00, 23 April 2008 (UTC)Beast of traal

The idea is interesting and I like it. --perseus the awesome 101 (talk) 01:49, 23 May 2008 (UTC) Perseus101

[edit] Edit Problem

When you click to edit the selected article the link says a page with that name does not exist . Someone please help.

[edit] List of Baryons

The list of baryons is currently a featured list candidate and we cannot get much people to support/oppose/comment since people are probably afraid to tackle such a technical list. Help would be appreciated. If you don't know much about particle physics, this is an opportunity for you to start learning, and you can contribute by mentioning what you didn't understand, or what got you confused. Thanks. Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 16:33, 27 May 2008 (UTC)

[edit] New Projects of the Week section on WikiProject Physics

See Wikipedia:WikiProject Physics/Projects of the Week

It's in construction and ANY help would really be appreciated.Headbomb (ταλκ · κοντριβς) 23:14, 13 June 2008 (UTC)