Talk:Hubble's law

Requested move 1 January 2023

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion. 

The result of the move request was: not moved. Numbers are moderately in favour of remaining in place (nb, two IP comments from very similar origin in Belgium were in support and counted as distinct). Support comments preferred to follow the IAU as authoritative, with expectation that WP:COMMONNAME would follow, while oppose comments held that the common name has not yet shifted, but may yet change in future. (non-admin closure) — HTGS (talk) 02:15, 9 January 2023 (UTC)

Hubble's law → Hubble–Lemaître law – This is now the new WP:COMMONNAME, after it was renamed in 2018. It is used by the relevant academic literature, see https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-030-80654-5_5 for example. Sadly Google Ngram is not yet usable since it only works up to 2019. PhotographyEdits (talk) 17:26, 1 January 2023 (UTC)


 * See also previous discussion on this. Banedon (talk) 22:18, 1 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Same as previous. Lean yes since it's the IAU and it represents the consensus of most astronomers. Similarly when the IAU redefined Pluto as a dwarf planet in 2006 we didn't adopt a wait-and-see-if-it-becomes-common stance. However I don't feel strongly either way. It's just a name, and it's obvious what is being referred to regardless of whether it's called Hubble's law or Hubble-Lemaitre law. Banedon (talk) 12:44, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. True common names are not determined by decree or by polls conducted only among specialist experts. —⁠ ⁠BarrelProof (talk) 04:48, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Disagree: specialists have thought this through. Common names can still be used in the article (as is currently the case).
 * alex (talk) 13:05, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. WP:COMMONNAME. The purpose of a name is to place a relatively-permanent label on an object, not to ascribe credit from moment to moment. Tarl N. ( discuss ) 12:16, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Disagree: look at country names: they can change too. alex (talk) 13:06, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. This is still the common name for the relation. It will take some years before we know whether the IAU recommendation becomes the name in common use. Their recommendations are not always followed, though it is good to recognize Lemaître. Common use means more than just academic papers, but textbooks and popular science articles. StarryGrandma (talk) 19:47, 2 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Disagree:
 * 1. Delaying the name change will make the common use more difficult, leading to a vicious circle.
 * 2. Fact is that the name change has been approved by a reference body.
 * alex (talk) alex (talk) 12:58, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Support.
 * - This is now the correct name for this law, as decided by a reference organisation.
 * - It should be introduced as soon as possible to prevent memory to fade again.
 * - One should also take into account the risk of resistance to a name that could be seen as belonging to / originating from the English language region,
 * alex (talk) 13:03, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia does not make the news, and should only reflect what is going on in the real world. If not changing the article title causes the memory to fade again, then it was not the common name in the first place (or at the very least, can be shown to have not been a significant-enough part of history to merit changing the page name). In other words, we cannot make fetch happen. Primefac (talk) 13:43, 3 January 2023 (UTC) I also changed the indenting of your message mainly for formatting purposes.
 * One should also take into account the risk of resistance to a name that could be seen as belonging to / originating from the English language region I'm not sure what you mean by that. Could you please explain. Maybe you are trying to say that we should be careful because refusing to adopt the non-English name "Lemaître" could be seen as cultural bias on our part? That's the opposite of what you wrote, so I apologize, but hence why I ask for clarification. Renerpho (talk) 21:32, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Or maybe you mean that the name "Hubble", which is an English name, may run into resistance from those who oppose the influence of English/American culture? I am guessing. Renerpho (talk) 21:35, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Support It is now the official name by the IAU. 2A02:A03F:AA2C:7200:D01A:6015:8D63:34BB (talk) 13:40, 3 January 2023 (UTC)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support. The International Astronomical Union is the internationally offically recognised body in charge of the nomenclature of everything in astronomy. And, although the International Astronomical Union cannot enforce the application of its resolutions, the fact that resolution B4 was adopted in October 2018, effectively means that the official name of the law is since then the "Hubble-Lemaître law".  (by Thierry Pauwels, member of the IAU)  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A03F:F8CE:7300:F943:ECF2:918D:792A (talk) 15:42, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * The officialness of IAU's role is overstated, both on this talk page, and in general. They have no mandate to name physical laws. All they can do is make recommendations, which they call resolutions. People will follow those recommendations when they are convenient, and ignore them otherwise. That is a democratic process, but there are no actual votes involved. Scientists vote with what they publish in scientific journals, not with what they vote on at IAU meetings. The ongoing discussion about the term dwarf planet (used in the IAU sense by some astronomers, not used in the IAU sense by most planetary scientists, and no consensus on Wikipedia as of November 2022) is a good example, as is IAU's recommendation to stop using the unit erg (see my comments here). And even if IAU were the most official body in the world, that still would not matter. There is a policy WP:COMMONNAME on Wikipedia, and there is WP:OFFICIALNAME. Only one of those is a policy saying what the title of a Wikipedia page should be (hint, it's not WP:OFFICIALNAME). Renerpho (talk) 16:26, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. We use the most common English term for article titles, which is not necessarily the officially sanctioned term. Rreagan007 (talk) 19:49, 3 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. The IAU carries sufficient weight for its resolutions to be considered common use in encyclopedias and other reference works. In fact, IAU resolutions are challenged so rarely that the exceptions (see: status of Pluto) become newsworthy on their own.--Lieven Smits (talk) 11:00, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. -- Necrothesp (talk) 14:11, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Support. If anyone gets to decide the names of astronomy-related things, it's the IAU. - Parejkoj (talk) 15:53, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment What source are we using for determining the WP:COMMONNAME? I don't think it's fair to use sources from before the renaming, because that heavily skews it towards the old name. In newer academic sources, the longer name is being used. And it's not popular subject that newspapers and magazines write about, so purely using academic sources seems fine to me. PhotographyEdits (talk) 17:27, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Nothing changed since Talk:Hubble's_law/Archive_3. &#32; Headbomb {t · c · p · b} 17:42, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Comment On another note, the WP:NAMECHANGES policy has not been mentioned yet, which says: "we give extra weight to independent, reliable English-language sources ("reliable sources") written after the name change. If the reliable sources written after the change is announced routinely use the new name, Wikipedia should follow suit and change relevant titles to match.". So that means my previous comment applies here. PhotographyEdits (talk) 18:24, 4 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose. Considering Google Scholar results since 2019, I found 344 results for "Hubble's law", 1040 results for "Hubble law", and 239 results for "Hubble-Lemaître law" (dash/hyphen and diacritic don't matter for the numbers). While there are significant caveats in taking those numbers too seriously, I would generally conclude that, although Hubble–Lemaître has increased in popularity in the past few years, it has not (yet?) turned into the common name, even if we accept that WP:NAMECHANGES applies. Separately, I think the level of officialness of the 2018 recommendation is overstated; there's neither formal authority nor de facto precedent. From Nature news coverage: "The move seems to be the first time an organization has voted to alter the name of a scientific law — although some scientists doubt whether the change will be noticed. The IAU has been the arbiter of planet and moon names since 1919, and oversees astronomers’ official catalogue of star names, but it has no formal mandate over the names of scientific laws. Piero Benvenuti, a former IAU general secretary who proposed the motion, says that the new terminology is a recommendation only. 'If people will continue to use the Hubble law naming, nobody will object,' he says." (See also for other coverage of the 2018 vote.) Adumbrativus (talk) 06:46, 5 January 2023 (UTC)
 * Oppose, for now Nothing significant has changed since I voted oppose on this in November 2018, and what I said in the previous discussion still applies. IAU has given a recommendation, nothing more; they could not do more since they have no mandate to name physical laws. IAU has demonstrated in other instances that they often do not follow their own recommendations (see the ergs example I gave in the old discussion). While Hubble–Lemaître law has been used in a number of publications (20-30%, going by Adumbrativus's count above), that does not yet make it the common name. We are not here to set (or even to follow) trends, but to report on current knowledge. The common name may still change in the future, but we are not there yet. Renerpho (talk) 15:57, 5 January 2023 (UTC)

Hubble tension article
Would it be advisable to start a separate article on the Hubble tension? It has a lot of traction in science news and would be easier to follow the developments. A small section in this article does not seem enough. ReyHahn (talk) 11:20, 28 November 2023 (UTC)
 * I'd support a split, but someone who have to write the separate article. Banedon (talk) 00:44, 29 November 2023 (UTC)

Wirtz paragraph
@AThinkingScientist added the following paragraph and I want to explain why I am taking it out. As written, the paragraph disputes the title of the article: how can it be Hubble's law if Wirtz discovered it? The claim may be 100% accurate but we have no way to verify this claim. The paragraph now has primary references (which are nice to have) but as explained in WP:PRIMARY such references are not adequate for controversial content. If this claim is "notable", that is important enough to be included in the encyclopedia, then there should be secondary references to back up the claim. See also WP:PSTS. To put it another way, wikipedia editors don't do historical analysis, we summarize historical analysis.
 * Before Hubble, German astronomer Carl Wilhelm Wirtz had, in two publications dating 1922 and 1924, already deduced with his own data that galaxies that appeared smaller and dimmer had larger redshifts and thus that more distant galaxies recede faster from the observer.

An addition issue is including the content directly in the lead is not correct. The content needs to be in the body of the article. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:47, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * "In Wikipedia, the lead section is an introduction to an article and a summary of its most important contents."


 * Thank you Johnbarton. This can be placed into the body. It is true that the discovery of the expanding Universe was achieved by Wirtz, at a time when astronomers had not realised this to be possible. It is correct to document this properly. Hubble did not discover the expansion, although he contributed significantly to constrain it with improved data. Given the political turmoils of that time, the German contribution was "forgotten".
 * A secondary reference is by Prof. Dr. Immo Appenzeller, Sterne und Weltraum, November 2009, pages 44-52 ("Carl Wirtz und die Hubble Beziehung"), wherein the history and contribution by Wirtz are accounted for. Would this be acceptable as a secondary reference? Not many people have followed this up, precisely because this collides with the generally-held view that Hubble discovered the expansion.
 * (I am not German by the way and am merely aiming to have a correct historical record of this affair on Wikipedia.) AThinkingScientist (talk) 16:25, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I tried to place this under "Slipher's observations with the secondary reference to Prof. Appenzeller's article.


 * But it gives an error message I cannot solve. It would be welcome if someone can help to import this properly. Wikipedia has a page on Sterne und Weltraum. AThinkingScientist (talk) 16:52, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * I think we need to do some more research. See This suggests the story is more complicated. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:25, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Some more refs:
 * GLASS, I.S., 'EDWIN HUBBLE: JOURNEYING TO THE EDGE', Revolutionaries of the Cosmos: The Astro-Physicists (Oxford, 2008; online edn, Oxford Academic, 1 Jan. 2010), https://doi-org.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199550258.003.0009,
 * "Duerbeck and Seitter (2000) cynically remark that ‘Hubble was the last of the early cosmologists who believed that his result confirmed the de Sitter model’. While this is superficially true, Hubble's work was by far the most systematic, especially as to finding distances, so he was not just the last person to point out the result, but he had said the last word on the matter. Other investigators, such as de Sitter himself, Wirtz, Lundmark and Silberstein had been hinting that the high velocities of the galaxies were of cosmological origin. Hetherington (1986) suggests that Hubble's pre-eminence was a result of his legal training that made him adept at advocating his point of view in a highly convincing manner."
 * "Modern Cosmology in Retrospect",  ISBN:9780521372138 United Kingdom, Cambridge University Press, 1990. contains a chapter by Seitter and Duerbeck devoted to Wirtz's work.  Also discusses Lundmark and others.
 * Kragh, H. (2014, November). Historical aspects of post-1850 cosmology. In AIP Conference Proceedings (Vol. 1632, No. 1, pp. 3-26). American Institute of Physics.
 * "With more and better data than previous workers in the field, Hubble showed that up to a distance of two megaparsecs (corresponding to a recessional velocity v ≅ 1,000 km/s) the redshifts or Doppler-velocities varied roughly linearly with the distances. In other words, he established as an empirical law that v = Hr, with H soon to be known as the Hubble constant."
 * "It is important to recognize that he did not interpret the redshifts or “apparent velocities” as Doppler shifts caused by the galaxies actually receding from the observer. Nor did he suggest that space is expanding, such as Lemaître had done. As he emphasized in a letter to de Sitter of 1931, he was content having demonstrated an empirical correlation."
 * Johnjbarton (talk) 16:37, 8 July 2024 (UTC)

Reference thoughts
With >150 references, most of them being journal articles and most of those being dozen-author articles, I was thinking it might be best for readability of the code to go with a list-defined reference as seen in places like List of largest stars and other journal-heavy articles. However, I know this can be potentially controversial so I thought I would bring it up before I spend the time to do so unilaterally. Primefac (talk) 18:52, 7 July 2024 (UTC)


 * Sorry I don't follow your suggestion. How about splitting the long list out and only having a summary here. Johnjbarton (talk) 21:44, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * Johnjbarton, see . Instead of having each reference clogging up the body of the text, they're listed at the bottom as named references to make reading the wikitext a bit easier. Primefac (talk) 22:26, 7 July 2024 (UTC)
 * It seems like this can be done selectively? If yes, it is a clear win if the clog bothers you. Johnjbarton (talk) 22:52, 7 July 2024 (UTC)