[WikiEN-l] It's not a good Unified Field Theory unless...

[Brian Salter-Duke]

On Sat, Jun 30, 2007 at 10:34:54PM +0100, Earle Martin wrote:
> ...it cites us as explanatory references:
> 
> http://www.nmtuft.com/
> 
> Our physics articles are obviously of citable quality now.

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.

> 
> -- 
> Earle Martin
>             http://downlode.org/
> http://purl.org/net/earlemartin/
> 
-- 
          Brian Salter-Duke            b_duke at bigpond.net.au  
               [[User:Bduke]]  mainly on en:Wikipedia.
           Also on fr: Wikipedia, Meta-Wiki and Wikiversity