On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 10:34:54PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote: Maybe they are, but I have to express some dissappointment about our Physics articles. Many of them are over-complex and in particular do not lead into the complexity with a simple introduction so the reader who knows nothing about the topic will at least get an idea of what the article is about. As a Physical Chemist or Chemical Physicist, although my degrees are in chemistry and I worked in university chemical departments all my career, I find many of the articles in the border area between chemistry and physics give the physics emphasis more the chemists. That emphasis is more mathematically and more rigorous. It is therefore easy to see why that emphasis dominates. It is hard to argue with an editor who says that some explanation has to be made rigorous as otherwise it is incorrect. Unfortunately this occurs in articles on topics that are actually more used by chemists than physicists, I am thinking of topics in thermodynamics and quantum chemistry for example. I find the attempt to make such articles clearer and give the information in part in a way that chemists will understand it, to be a very frustrating and exhausting process and I often back out and leave an article for a while. This is an issue that really needs to be addressed as physicists are still very mathematically able, but chemists are increasingly less mathematically able. My experience of teaching physical chemistry for 40 years is that the level of mathematically background in students has decreased. There is plenty of evidence for this, not least of which is the increasing number of textbooks that cover physical chemistry in a less mathematically rigorous fashion. For example I doubt whether more than 1% of undergraduates understand the idea of exact differentials or have been seriously taught them. 30 years ago all chemistry majors would have been introduced to them in a thorough fashion, although as always many would have promptly forgotten all about them. At the same time, chemists are using very complex computer based tools such as ab initio quantum chemistry. They do so without going through all the mathematical derivations and theorems, but they need to know the basis of the methods and their limitations. These can be completely lost in the mathematical complexity in a article that is dominated by the physics emphasis, even when the method is much more used by chemists than physicists. -- Brian Salter-Duke b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au [[User:Bduke]] mainly on en:Wikipedia. Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity

On 6/30/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: It may be hard to see how I would, but the article on "Unified Field Theories" does, and it's hard to read any further once they do. And how could I resist lobbing such a pretty one to any particle physicists out there? Wikipedia covers theoretical physics fairly well, and applications of particle physics, too. But falls down on a lot of the related math, not being able to explain the math, simply showing the math, and on technological applications of physics in areas outside of particle physics. On behalf of those who wouldn't know a Unified Field Theory if one fell out of an apple tree onto their head, KP

On Sun, 1 Jul 2007 08:58:18 +1000, Brian Salter-Duke <b_duke(a)bigpond.net.au> wrote: This is certainly true of some of the more obscure topics. I am reasonably well educated (good honours degree in electrical engineering), but have found at least half a dozen articles on physics topics that were close to unintelligible. Some of this is due to the articles I get drawn to: in most cases it's because some loon is trying to rewrite the article to more accurately explain this Great New Way of looking at it that the journals inexplicably fail to follow up. If you get my drift. Guy (JzG) -- http://www.chapmancentral.co.uk http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:JzG

On 7/1/07, Guy Chapman aka JzG <guy.chapman(a)spamcop.net> wrote: This does happen, but I don't think this is Brian's overall concern. There are many concepts in physics which can be explained quite directly, even the most seemingly advanced concepts--and without the math, and to a general audience. The bulk of the physics articles do this well. I love math, but when I want to understand something I don't go to math first. I got to spend a full day with Helen Quinn many years ago, all day following her around, listening to her talk about physics, peppering her with a zillion questions on every topic in the known universe (her known universe, not something so small as mine). Without using mathematics or analogies, and she didn't spend much time with diagrams, either, she can directly explain any concept in physics. Okay, you're snickering that I want to apply the "Helen Quinn" standard to Wikipedia physics articles, but in fact, many of articles are quite good. It is only in certain areas of physics where we fall down. Some of this is what Guy is saying, where a less mainstream idea is being placed on Wikipedia as a fully accepted theory, but I think these get taken care of. Others are just the overly mathematical approach to physics without any idea that the underlying concepts should be explained without math, and then the mathematical idea developed. The editors who use this approach see the mathematics, but don't appreciate any interference that requires more than math (the scream, "it's rigorous!") An introductory, straight-forward, development and explanation of concepts is important even to physics articles, even to math articles. Thanks for the laugh, Eugene. KP

On 30/06/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene(a)vanderpijll.nl> wrote: Yes - the only Google hit for "Nonlocal Medium Theory" suggests that the author of this, erm, theory, has been trying to promote it for a decade or so. Thankfully a few years later Wikipedia arrived, and all those citations make the page look so much more convincing.... Earle (only a second year undergraduate physicist) -- Earle Martin http://downlode.org/ http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/