Talk:Maurice Allais

POV Material
Hi, I reverted the work of 67.170.224.36 which appears to be either an attempt at original research or a personal rant. Regardless, it is not NPOV and doesn't belong in the quotes section. I hope the author of this material will take the time to include it in the article more professionally. Coleca 08:44, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

Allais cannot be considered a physicist
Maurice Allais cannot be considered a physicist even though he made some claims related to physics. He has no peer-reviewed publications in this field and his claims are highly controversial at best. This is not enough by any standard to claim oneself a physicist the same way as no well known physicist expressing opinions on economics could be considered an economist. LeYaYa 13:08, 4 November 2006 (UTC)
 * He has a general science degree and the NASA calls him a physicist; apparently he does have peer-reviewed publications in phyiscs - http://www.comptesrendus.org/phy/index.php . Harald88 20:05, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

Allais effect
I vaguely remember to have seen a very plausible sounding explanation that it was caused by air pressure changes that occur during an eclipse, but I don't remember the reference. Maybe someone else knows? Harald88 15:25, 25 November 2006 (UTC)

edits by user:Moroder
Moroder, I revert your edits as they were incompatible with policy. As you are unexperienced, here is an explanation:


 * 1. This article is about Maurice Allais and it should inform the readers about his notabale ideas and claims. That information must be verifiable, preferably cited from his own publications. In this case we linked to an "antirelativity" site that contains a carbon copy; you don't seriously claim that there is substantial doubt that that copy is reliable, or do you? See also WP:V.
 * But if you claim that "antirelativity" above his work gives a negative impression, so that the link could be interpreted as making a negative suggestion about Allais, that may be something to consider. From what I read I don't think that he would be offended. Harald88 19:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)


 * 2. Original research, such as making POV suggestions about quality of works that can not be verified is not allowed. In this case: error bars are of little importance for correlation analysis, except if the correlation is low. The statement "lack of error bars" is your POV (which doesn't belong in Wikipedia); it wrongly suggested that there is a notable and verifiable criticism that addresses his work and according to which that is a shortcoming. See WP:NOR.

Harald88 19:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)


 * As he/she insists in removing references against WP:V and continues to write in a biased way against WP:NPOV, insisting on keeping his/her WP:Original research, I now added the appropriate banners and indicators... Harald88 21:30, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

edits by user:Harald88
harry, I took out your reference to the crackpot website www.anti-relativity.com


 * Allais paper is not peer - reviewed, as an "experienced" wikipedian you should know that repeatedly quoting it is a no-no. If you want to express your POV, feel free to do it elswhere. Moroder 21:06, 27 November 2006 (UTC)

NPOV in this article
Moroder -

This is not the same situation as twin paradox. Under WP:NPOV, you cannot just tear into the subject (or subjects) of the article. You simply cannot write things like "[This paper] suffers from the conspicous absence of experimental error bars". However, you can say that the paper has been criticised for lacking experimental error bars, and provide a supporting reference.

Think of yourself as a reporter here, and remember that your audience is the general public, and not just fellow scientists. Your job is to report the facts in the text, not to judge them. That Allais' article "suffers" is very biased terminology which violates WP:NPOV. However noting that it has been "criticized as suffering ..." is not as you are now reporting another fact. I advise reading WP:NPOV and WP:NPOV.

Note that I fully support your content. The issues are in the style and the tone. --EMS | Talk 04:45, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Thank you, I corrected the tone, the message is the same. BTW, harry picked up the Allais "paper" of the www.anti-relativity.com website. Next time you will need to be more careful about the reversals Moroder 07:50, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Moroder - This article is about Maurice Allais, not special relativity, and what is significant or an acceptable source is going to be very different given that Allais himself is the subject. There is no way that www.anti-relativity.com can be a reliable source for a relativity article.  However, it is a reliable source for information about an anti-relativist like Allais.  So I have no qualms about reverting back to Harald's version, as his text was sourced and NPOV while yours was not.

Please proof your addition
The flow and wording of your addition are not good. Please read it over carefully and fix it up. It just does not read well. --EMS | Talk 16:40, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Reverted after further review
Moroder - As I read and reread what you wrote, it became more and more obvious that you are just trashing the newer Allias article with a few references added. It is not NPOV to outright trash an article like that. You keep writing first-person opinions instead of third-person opinions (i.e. "this article suffers ...." instead of "X has shown that this new article suffers ..."). Also, by expanding the assiciated text you are giving added importance to this newer article at the expense of the other, better known work. That is also inappropriate.

I did make one change in the revert: I added spacing above the note that modern experiments comfirm the predictions of SR to make it more prominent. The difference is subtle, but it brings ones eyes to the most important thing about these articles. --EMS | Talk 17:02, 14 December 2006 (UTC)

Be careful what you bring in when you revert

 * EMS, the so-called Allais paper is lifted off the Anti Relativity forum where it sits side by side with the Chritopher Bjerknes "science". It is not peer reviewed. As such, it should not even be mentioned AT ALL. So, please take down the reference alltogether Moroder 17:36, 14 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Moroder - This time I haver restored that reference on purpose. If this article is going to discuss that analysis, then it is damned well going to cite it!  WP:Verifiability demands that.  (See WP:Verifiability).  The issue is not whether the reference belongs in that text.  Instead it is whether that text belongs in this article!  Maurice Allais is most notable due to his 1954 observations that came to be called the Allais effect.  I am not at all sure that this 1988 research is notable itself, but given a refutation or two in ArXiv or even in the peer-reviewed literature, I am more that willing to admit it as such.


 * My advice is to let Allias be hung in this article by the basic facts surrounding his work: That it has received attention but has never stood up to scrutiny.  I need to look at the links removed by the last revert I did of your edit now, as I think I removed two links that refuted the 1988 work that would be useful inthis context. I also know that there are a number of articles that refute the Allias effect itself.  The most important of the anti-Allias effect articles should be discreetly cited here, along with the original Alias effect article and also the citation for Dennis Miller's research.


 * Dealing with people like Allias in Wikipedia is an art. If you are going to write about them at all, then sources that would normally not be reliable do be come reliable.  Look at it this way:  I would not look to www.anti-relativity.com for good physics, but it is a fine place to go to find a good biography about Allais or a copy of a controversial but unpublished analysis by Allais.  Please keep in mind that this is a biographical article, not a scientific one.  That is why somewhat different rules apply here.  That is not to say that you should hype the work of these people, but you need to keep a neutral point of view and you discreetly make it clear what the status of Allais and his work is within the sceintific community. --EMS | Talk 05:38, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * EMS, thanks for taking the effort of spelling out to Morodor what he did not read. Also I agree that Allais is best known for his Nobel prize in Economics as well as for the "Allais effect" and for which now rather down-to-earth explanations have been given. Harald88 13:17, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * EMS, the Allais "paper" is not peer reviewed. As such, the article should not even be in wiki. Please remove the whole entry as you have done for the Unnikrishnan "paper". Thank you Moroder 15:03, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * I have no interest in removing that content, as IMO it helps to show that Allias is a physics "crank". Please not that a self-published and/or non-peer-reviewed item can be included in a biogracphical article under WP:RS.
 * Moroder - IMO both you an Harald88 are failing to take the context into account in applying WP:NPOV and WP:RS. Material that is appropriate for one kind of article may not be appropriate elsewhere. Science articles and biographical articles are two different things.  In talking about Allais, WP:NPOV admits items that are a joke in a page like special relativity.  So what is needed is not dogmatism but balance. --EMS | Talk 17:52, 15 December 2006 (UTC)


 * Hi EMS, as I tried to explain the same in my words based on what I did, I wonder what made you think that I didn't do as I said. Anyway, thanks for trying to point that out to him in your words. Harald88 12:33, 4 January 2007 (UTC)

Maurice Allais is a physics experimenter
I structured the text to separate his economics and physics activity. In the physics paragraph, I tried to highlight the fact that the important contribution of Allais was to experiment with gravity, which give reproducible effects. His claims are secondary (the preceding version reduced his contribution in physics to his controversial claims). Arjen Dijksman 22:20, 12 May 2007 (UTC)

I feel uncomfortable with the end of: The claim of anisotropy of space is considered by mainstream physics to be refuted by modern precision experiments which have continually verified the relativity predictions.  The results in the first reference (KT test) need some explanation. Does it fully agree with relativity prediction? For that same test, what would Allais predict? It is not clear whether this test discriminates between both predictions.

The second reference describes a proposed test which has not yet given any results: it is not part of the modern precision experiments which have continuously verified the relativity predictions. Arjen Dijksman 20:46, 15 May 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, it does agree fully with SR and it does contradict Allais' erroneous analysis of Dayton Miller. Allais predicts a deviation from the null result. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.170.232.4 (talk)
 * Full agreement is a peremptory POV, when it is stated in the KT test reference that a RMS parameter of A = (1.9 +/- 2.1) 10^-5 can be deduced. As far as I know, Allais says nothing about a KT test comparing a iodine standard and a resonator standard. The anomalous optical effect is detectable for Michelson-Morley interferometers with much larger distances between mirrors. I have seen no reference that says that the KT test discriminates between SR and Allais. I therefore remove the reference to that test which is not suitable in this encyclopedic article. Arjen Dijksman 21:10, 29 May 2007 (UTC)
 * Are you kidding? The result is "there cannot be an ether drift greater than…". And Allais is ten orders over it! Allais simply never cared about disagreement between his theories and experiments more recent than Miller's! Barraki 16:10, 26 June 2007 (UTC)
 * Hmm... this is no laughing matter. By the way this is an article about what Allais did, not about what he never cared about. Could you please explain the disagreement between Allais' analysis of Miller's experiment and the KT experiment cited? In that latter experiment are there resonance or metal shielding effects that could possibly account for a different behavior? Are the full results of that experiment accesible in the Phys Rev article? If they are and because they were done over a period of 190 days, I suspect Maurice Allais would care about them: in L'Anisotropie de l'Espace, page 428, he writes that "so many experiments ... have failed or are falsely interpreted because they rested upon observations of limited duration". Arjen Dijksman 19:08, 1 July 2007 (UTC)

. Well, "generally considered" is an euphemism: the most precise experiences designed specially to find anisotropy showed a null result. Barraki 10:45, 30 August 2007 (UTC)
 * I agree with your unease about the last sentence: modern physics literature is divided both in analysis and experimental results - it's certainly not as clearcut as pretended. Moreover, the suggestion of "mainstream physics" misrepresents the physics community as if it is divided in different sects such as with religion. Thus I'll try to make that sentence more factual. Harald88 18:01, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
 * Seriously, I think this diff is very unfair. Today, string theory is the most trusted unification theory, and quantum loop gravity is the only major challenger. Both of them try to include general relativity. Dropping all the relativity is not an option.
 * "The claim of anisotropy of space is generally considered to be incompatible with many modern experiments that have not shown any such anomalities."


 * Please cite the experiment that claims to (not) measure the anisotropy of Allais - I don't know any that claims not to measure it. Instread I do know of a few low-quality ones that claim to confirm it. Harald88 18:52, 30 September 2007 (UTC)
 * Balian wrote a paper to refute his interpretation of Miller's result. So, we already quoted an article about anisotropy failed research. And, no, AFAIK, no physicist from a famous lab did experiment to verify it. In this field, not speaking about Allais is worse than insulting him. Barraki 15:15, 10 October 2007 (UTC)
 * Where is that quote by Balian?? Harald88 20:15, 11 October 2007 (UTC)
 * This: http://www.bib.ensmp.fr/cgi-bin/visu.pl?14971 Barraki 16:28, 13 October 2007 (UTC)
 * That link doesn't seem to refer to a published paper; and nothing shows up in my browser.
 * However, http://rocks.ensmp.fr/cgi-bin/koha/opac-detail.pl?bib=49515 does work. I'll try to obtain it. Harald88 16:25, 4 November 2007 (UTC)

WikiProject class rating
This article was automatically assessed because at least one article was rated and this bot brought all the other ratings up to at least that level. BetacommandBot 23:41, 27 August 2007 (UTC)

repetition by NASA(?) and others of his pendulum experiments
If I remember well (I think I saw it on a NASA website), his pendulum experiments have been repeated by many other scientists with mixed results. Surely that's interesting and worthwhile of mention; hopefully someone else remembers the details and references. Harald88 18:47, 28 August 2007 (UTC)
 * The NASA made test in 1999, yes. But while they announced it before,, they made few comments after. Honnestly, I can't understand this: there is no shame testing an hypothetical effect and find nothing, neither finding an unexplainable effect. Barraki 10:55, 30 August 2007 (UTC)


 * OK thanks for the refs! Surely we can include the basic facts, citing the Nasa reference. Harald88 20:39, 31 August 2007 (UTC)

Quote
The quote:
 * "In essence, the present creation of money, out of nothing by the banking system, is similar - I do not hesitate to say it in order to make people clearly realize what is at stake here - to the creation of money by counterfeiters, so rightly condemned by law."

Source: La Crise mondiale d’aujourd’hui. Pour de profondes réformes des institutions financières et monétaires., Maurice Allais, éd. Clément Juglar, 1999, p. 110. Note 2.

Getting balance right
The article had a brief summary of his pathbreaking work in economics (the reason he has a WP article) followed by a long section on his amateur/fringe work in physics. I've greatly shortened the physics stuff, and will try to expand the economics over time. JQ (talk) 06:17, 26 April 2012 (UTC)

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intro paragraph phrasing unclear
"They formalize the self-regulation of markets, which Keynes refuted but reiterated some of Allais's ideas." What is this sentence trying to say? If Keynes reiterated some of Allais' ideas, the sentence structure is wrong, the part after 'but' does not connect to the referent of 'which'. Tawiscaron (talk) 18:15, 3 March 2024 (UTC)