Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive March 2020

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. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Gandalf61 (talk • contribs)

Thanks for calling attention to this. The page has been protected by Favonian until the 31st. XOR'easter (talk) 16:44, 17 March 2020 (UTC)

Unified Scattering Function

Unified Scattering Function (edit | talk | history | protect | delete | links | watch | logs | views)

I've accepted this from a draft. There may be some sort of conflict of interest at play, so it needs to be reviewed and brought up to standard, or sent to AfD. – bradv🍁 05:17, 18 March 2020 (UTC)

The "lead" is way too long for sure. The idea that the same scaling can apply to multiple setups must be older than 1995, so this might be Beaucage reinventing things that were known before (maybe not under that name). --mfb (talk) 05:49, 18 March 2020 (UTC)