Talk:Cotes's spiral

Meaning of h
What quantity does h represent? Areal velocity like in article or specific angular momentum like in the external link at MathWorld ?--188.26.22.131 (talk) 14:32, 9 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The quantity h is the specific angular momentum (angular momentum per unit mass). The areal velocity is actually h/2. SimpsonDG (talk) 15:03, 10 December 2013 (UTC)

Much More Detailed Contribution Reverted - Resulting in Very Deficient Entry
I found the original entry on Cotes's Spiral's unsatisfactory.

The very minimum I would expect to see is that there are 5 of them, not 3.

A couple of years ago, I made to a great effort to make the entry much more comprehensive.

This even involved trying to understand the Harmonia Mensurarum which was in Latin, a language I have no training in. So I was struggling with many pieces of text like the following:

Sit S centrum virium, exear que corpus de loco P, secundum rectam PQ vel QP, ea cum velocitate quam acquirere posset ab ijsdem viribus, libere cadendo versus centrum S de loco C, et casu suo describendo altitudinem CP.

Which was quite a chore (even using a translation program). I thought my contribution contained a good deal of scholarship, going back to the original sources, eg Cotes and Newton, which is what I would expect to see.

You seem to prefer to take your information on Cotes's Spiral's from some recent textbook, which is very incomplete.

My contribution has all but vanished, apart from a few comments in 'History'.

If you deemed my contribution unworthy, why did you not at least have the courtesy to inform me? You could have explained what was wrong and given me the opportunity to revise it.

On reflection, I thought that what had been done was such an abomination that I have added the 2 Cases that were wilfully removed.

What had been perpetrated was the removal of established and verifiable facts about Cotes's Spirals, replacing them with knowingly false information.

Every single reference to there being 5 Spirals was deliberately removed. How can Wikipedia possibly justify that?

Mike Mikerollem (talk) 11:55, 21 August 2018 (UTC)

My comments above may be a little unfair, since everything published in the last 100 years or so repeats the error that there are only 3 Cotes's Spirals. Sadly, it's a common problem, that if something is repeated often enough it comes to be accepted as true, even when false.

There appears to be no mechanism within Wikipedia to root out such errors.

Mike Mikerollem (talk) 15:00, 26 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I share your outrage. 75.172.96.27 (talk) 03:40, 12 September 2022 (UTC)