Talk:Scale relativity

Article Update
Dear Wikipedians,

I made an in-depth update of the article. I’m not a native english speaker, nor a regular Wikipedia editor, so I hope you will forgive my eventual clumsiness.

I did my best to keep the article nontechnical and accessible to a wide public. However, many aspects of the theory are highly technical (especially using advanced fractal mathematics). I focused on explaining the main concepts, and showing how the theoretical predictions compare to the observed values. I provided many references, so technically-minded readers can check the details.

I left out the discussion about angular momentums, which I found was not very pedagogical, and maybe too technical. I preferred to leave space for more fundamental insights and results of the theory. Of course, if it could be better formulated and introduced, and if many of you think this section is important, please feel free to rework it and to re-introduce it.

For those interested to contribute, here is what remains to be done:

- correct English mistakes

- correct syntactical mistakes. The maths may not be very clean or standard. The article-rewrite was exported from a LibreOffice document (see []). I exported the ODT file to the mediawiki syntax, I don’t know how reliable this process is. I thought the existence of this PDF may be useful to know in case there is any conversion issue.

- mention and/or link scale relativity in other wikipedia articles (especially the ones where I put a link to the “main article”).

- more technical explanations, derivations and equations may or should be added in the future, especially for professional physicists. Ideally, maybe this should be followed up by splitting the article into two: a technical and comprehensive exposition, and an “Introduction to scale relativity” Introduction_to_scale_relativity. Maybe something similar to Introduction_to_general_relativity ?

I’ll finish as soon as possible to:

- update internal links within the document

- update links in Wikipedia (I gave the full URL instead)

- update the referencing system to match the one of wikipedia

Thank you for your attention, and in thanks advance if you wish to help.

Best regards,

Clementvidal (talk) 16:08, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Linking to Process Physics
I recently stumbled upon scale relativity and it sounds very interesting.

I wonder whether it would be appropriate to include a link to Process Physics here too?

PP is similar in that it proposes a fractal structure for space. Both theories would be considered 'fringe physics' too, wouldn't they?

Just a thought really Danwills (talk) 05:25, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Criticism
Scale relativity theory has no recognized value among physicists. Its reputation in France was roughly reduced to a mere mediatic phenomenon made by some popular science journals, spreading the myth of a genial discoverer... This myth was based on the fact that Nottale's writing ways made it practically impossible to criticize his ideas, because... his empty "theory" was a mere game of introductions and announcements, that did not present any precise idea that could be a matter of criticism. In other words, it seemed like "not even false". The few scientists that tried to examine what it was about, just gave up because there was nothing to understand there. So it required some courage and time to find and write down any concrete reason to disagree, in order to put any stop to the mediatic worship of this assumed misunderstood genius, which mosts scientists won't bother doing as soon as they noticed there was nothing interesting for physics to see there. Years ago I developed this criticism in French. I'm sorry I did not translate it into English, and I have myself other more important things to do in life than to work on this translation. Some other physicists approved my remarks, but of course as usual they did not take the time and risks to work further on explanations or to make any public mentions on this subject. Since I developed this criticism fully enough, which then appeared for years among the first few google results on "Nottale" or "Relativité d'échelle" (the French for "scale relativity), no defender of Scale Relativity had anything effective to reply but they just gave up or kept silent (except one that published back a lot of insults but nothing concrete); the mediatic enthusiasm in France for Nottale's ideas stopped, and it did not interest anybody anymore.

I'm sorry to see more people still waste their time with this non-theory, just because they did not yet examine the deep contents to see themselves that it is empty (if they know physics well enough for this, of course) and because they don't understand French. All what I can offer you now, apart from my references page in French that includes some English links, is this recent little mention about Nottale linking to my criticism. Other criticism: http://antispirituality.net/nottale-scale-relativity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.222.83.40 (talk) 10:54, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

One more thing: why did not this article link to the French equivalent ? To not let visitors be aware of the bad reputation of this "theory" in France, through the inclusions of the criticism motives to the French version of the article that nobody dared to edit away ? Okay, I'll do this now. --Spoirier (talk) 00:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Comment on the comment above
I definitely disagree with the comment above. Mathematically scale relativity is no more wrong than Leibniz. With some work most of the statements cab be made precise as already demonstrated by several authors. If there is interest I can elaborate further. It seems that the above author has no scientific credibility and a personal streak at attacking Nottale. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.236.210.203 (talk • contribs) 129.93.33.196
 * Comment on the comment on the comment above. If one does a bit of research into 'how' Einstein developed his GR theory, one learns that it was not nearly so 'well-developed' as the polished final product. Nevertheless, other people of superior mathematical talent took his ideas and found ways to make them work, and today GR is considered the preeminent physical theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.93.33.196 (talk • contribs)

Scale Relativity is an attempt to eliminate infinities that occur at extreme high energy in General Relativity. Scale of one is General Relativity that covers nearly all situations. The intent of Scale Relativity is to allow higher scales in some extreme high energy cases. Validity of Scale Relativity depends on the concept of Frame Dragging predicted from General Relativity. Claims for and against Frame Dragging have been made with supporting data published about deflection of Earth satellites. Opponents have questioned the accuracies. If Frame Dragging becomes widely accepted then the structure of space time comes into question about how much stress energy can be contained in a dragged frame. In this regard the space inside a fast moving object as well as the space out side near by are included in the Dragged Frame. Scale Relativity allows the quantum state of space time to change when energy density exceeds a critical value. In this way infinities do not occur.

The U and R processes of Roger Penrose give an alternative view of scales and how they might occur. The U process is a an evolution like increasing energy density in General Relativity. The R process is a change of quantum state in space time when the energy density has reached a limit. After the R process there occurs another U process that represents a scale of two or more.

Raising the quantum state of space time represents an increase of angular momentum, which creates unfilled energy states. It isn't proven whether or not space time has angular momentum separate from the objects that move in it, so the concept is theoretical. General Relativity covers such a wide range of energies that it is doubtful whether or not a scale higher than one can be observed outside a fast moving object. Astrojed (talk) 23:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Bekenstein Bound?
How does scale relativity deal with the Bekenstein bound? 70.247.168.170 (talk) 03:44, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Non-NPOV and other issues
Validity of the subject aside, it's written in a distinctly unencyclopedic form with some subtle non-NPOV aspects. It relies on a single site for citations, and given the mention I've seen in the Talk page here and a few other locations, it seems like there should be a Criticism section. Unfortunately, the major criticisms are over my head or in a language I don't speak or read, so I can't get this started fairly. Martin Blank (talk) 20:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Related approaches
The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause.

For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.

--SSA7471 (talk) 15:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Tidying up references and citations
I have started to tidy up the references and citations here, so far initial preparation. A lot more needs to be done and for a while the resulting display will be inconsistent, with some items finished before others. Since I won't be changing the content itself unless I happen to notice a particular problem, there is probably no need to add a "work in progress" template. --Mirokado (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2016 (UTC)
 * The initial preparation added 4208 bytes to the article, but 10800 bytes have been removed already with a dozen or so citations more or less completed, so this exercise will clearly be worthwhile. Doing the first few manually helped me understand what was needed. It will be more reliable as well as faster if I write a "little script" to finish the job, so there will probably be a break of a few days before any more similar edits, but a nice long weekend is coming up... --Mirokado (talk) 16:21, 23 May 2016 (UTC)
 * The main tidying up is now finished. Source size was reduced from 127203 to 92219 bytes, a saving of 34983 bytes, a little more than 25% of the starting size!
 * The following citation is not currently used in the article, moved here in case we need it later:
 * Some mopping up is still needed, for example adding more ISBNs, checking citation title capitalisation, adding the  param where necessary, perhaps I will return to this article after a break for a while. --Mirokado (talk) 21:13, 1 June 2016 (UTC)
 * Some mopping up is still needed, for example adding more ISBNs, checking citation title capitalisation, adding the  param where necessary, perhaps I will return to this article after a break for a while. --Mirokado (talk) 21:13, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Discussion with SSA7471
Hello SSA7471,

You deleted entirely 4 sections and about 9 subsections of the article (-11,080 bytes). I didn’t see any reason for the deletion of sections “Singularity and evolutionary tree”, “Cognitive aspects”, “Sociological analysis”, or “Reactions”, so I re-established them.

Regarding the general justification of your edit “removed all content related to quantum gravity since that is just wrong and clarified the status that SR holds within mainstream physics & what SR really is (an QM interpretation)”, I think you do have an important point, that you already made in the talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scale_relativity#Related_approaches):

“The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause. For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.”

Although the matter gets more technical, to take fully into account your valid point, I added two sections about Nelson stochastic mechanics and Bohm mechanics:

--

Nelson stochastic mechanics
At first sight, scale relativity and Nelson's stochastic mechanics share features, such as the derivation of the Schrödinger equation.

Nelson, Edward. 1966. “Derivation of the Schrödinger Equation from Newtonian Mechanics.” Physical Review 150 (4): 1079–85. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079.

However, Nelson's mechanics has been refuted, with mutitime correlations in repeated measurements (see: Wang, M. S., and Wei-Kuang Liang. 1993. “Comment on ‘Repeated Measurements in Stochastic Mechanics.’” Physical Review D 48 (4): 1875–77. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875.)

By contrast, scale relativity is not founded on a stochastic approach, and doesn’t fall into the refutation of stochastic mechanics: “Here, the fractality of the space-time continuum is derived from its nondifferentiability, it is constrained by the principle of scale relativity and the Dirac equation is derived as an integral of the geodesic equation. This is therefore not a stochastic approach in its essence, even though stochastic variables must be introduced as a consequence of the new geometry, so it does not come under the contradictions encountered by stochastic mechanics.” (Nottale 2011, 265.)

Bohm’s mechanics
Bohm's mechanics is a hidden variables theory, which is not the case of scale relativity. In this way, they are quite different. "In the scale relativity description, there is no longer any separation between a “microscopic” description and an emergent “macroscopic” description (at the level of the wave function), since both are accounted for in the double scale space and position space representation."" (Nottale 2011, 360)

However the title of the section is: “Scale relativity and other approaches”. So, by definition the “other approaches” will be different from scale relativity! The purpose of the section is precisely to help the Wikipedia reader situate scale relativity in the landscape of options to unify QM and GR. There are two ways to try to unify QM and GR. To start from QM, or to start from relativity. Quantum gravity theories explore the former, scale relativity the latter.

Otherwise, I do agree that ScR provides a QM interpretation, but it provides also many other insights (e.g. at macroscopic scales), so it can not be reduced to yet an other QM interpretation. Regarding your statement “Scale relativity is considered fringe science by the vast majority of the physics community and mostly ignored.” It seems to be your personal opinion, and as such it is a NPOV violation, so I deleted it. I guess it's not obvious to give an objective definition of "fringe science"?

For information, according to Google Scholar, Laurent Nottale has an h-index of 32, and totals 4418 academic citations. This simply doesn’t qualify as ignorance from the physics community. But if you can provide secondary sources to support your claim, please do add them with a NPOV style.

I can understand this part of your comment:

“It's a common misconception that scale relativity is a theory about quantum gravity and as such is a competitor to String theory, loop quantum gravity and others. This is wrong. Scale relativity says nothing about gravity, classical or quantum. It's a spacetime theory about ordinary quantum mechanics, not theory about quantum spacetime."”

However, it depends at how you look at the issue. If you assume that quantum gravity is the only possible starting assumption to try to unify QM and GR, then you’re right, they are not in competition. They could be seen as competitors if the aim is to find a coherent picture of QM and relativity. For the purpose of writing this Wikipedia article, I’m personally not interested in competition, but more in an exposition of the landscape of options to unify QM and relativity. I have done my best to integrate your core points, but please let me know in this talk page if you have further ideas to improve the article.

Best, Clementvidal (talk) 08:05, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

singularity and evolutionary trees??
from other fields, one tends to be dismayed by the formidable mathematical-complexity of physics, that tends to discount any possibility of any useful contribution unless one has been dealing with the specific formulas & math for years on end... yet here, we can see an example that those from the physics & mathematical fields, may also, at least at times, be poorly adept in other fields as well, to the point of seeming as imbeciles... degenerated into little more than common cult-prophets, but that attempt their prophecy thru calculations, but that don't even have a few percent of the needed variables entailed, mainly from outside their field, to make such calculations! ...those from the evolutionary biology field, or general biology, altho 'properly-obsessed', don't seem quite as 'vastly-obsessed' with 'grand predictive models', of the future, everything, or whatever else, as these sorts, who seem to feel an uber-need for omniscience, totality, & congruence, even trying to apply their mentality to various fields in biology! rather than at least some contentment as well in the 'high-mathematical' 'present-value' & 'special-individuality' of what they observe, and keeping moderation in their obsessions... but, diversity in general, is special too, as well when it comes to 'scientific brainware'... (and we must remember, that these 'densely-periodic' and 'grand-ecstatic-fulminations' of theirs are good at raising financing... perhaps they are not random, are formulaic somehow, & follow some type of mathematical-law that biologists can help determine? ...as the physicists, mathematicians, & engineers are at least 'partially-biological', still? yes?? in these 'relatively-early' times???) ~yw

The very inclusion of Singularity and Evolutionary Tree in an otherwise purely physics related article is an absurdity unless you are talking about a Black Hole singularity and your evolutionary tree is about how stars evolve. The Singularity mentioned is about the postulated merger of technology and man and the subsequent end of Life as we Know It. The Evolutionary Tree mentioned is about the Evolution of Species and not other kinds of evolution (which word means "Change" and not much more - add vinegar to baking soda and watch as the mixture EVOLVES CO2 gas.). 50.247.247.81 (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Tagged as fringe
I tagged this article as WP:FRINGE. This all seems to be highly questionable, as some others have noted. It seems to be very closely wrapped up with Mohammed El Naschie, which should set off alarm bells, although I don't know for sure if that's simply because El Naschie has glommed on to this and such association shouldn't be held against it.

On a side note, for such a fringe idea, the article itself has way way way too much detail. I'm personally at a loss as far as what should be done with this, and suggestions would be very welcome. --Deacon Vorbis (talk) 17:11, 21 April 2017 (UTC)
 * Better to read a ten-page wikipedia article than to buy Nottale's latest book blindly for 150 euros. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.93.33.196 (talk) 22:28, 15 May 2019 (UTC)
 * , well, enthusiasts of scale relativity have tried to "develop" it by connecting it with El Naschie's nonsense and publishing in El Naschie's journal . And in his book, Nottale mentions El Naschie's work approvingly and thanks him for support . (This book was published in 2011; the Chaos, Solitons & Fractals scandal broke in 2008.) And Nottale contributed to a Festschrift in El Naschie's honor. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 22:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Oh wow, I had forgotten all about this. Thanks for taking a look at it.  –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 22:18, 4 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Deacon Vorbis] your claim that the SR group develops the Scale relativity theory in the direction of El Naschie's theory is entirely nonsensical. You are 20 years off the current literature. By claiming this you only show blatant ignorance // DP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.49.65.90 (talk) 22:00, 24 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, I'm entirely ignorant of the subject, as I freely admitted in my initial post. But there was a strong consensus to merge this to Nottale's article, so please stop undoing this.  –Deacon Vorbis (carbon &bull; videos) 22:09, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Discussing and motivating deletions
User Dlthewave deleted 6999 bytes without any other justification than "rm some of the worst editorializing". Please explain! Why is it "the worst editorializing"? Is there a way you could improve things without bluntly deleting without any justification? Thanks.

User XOR&#39;easter deleted -86,714 bytes ‎with no other justification than "stubify: the promotionalism was extravagant, the descriptions of established science were inaccurate, the secondary sources that do exist are superficial and/or dubious, and no distinction was made between El Naschie and actual physics". Please explain and argue in detail all your points. Otherwise they remain only your vague personal opinions. In the meantime that we solve this in this talk page, I re-established oldid: 938866469 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scale_relativity&oldid=938866469).

Other moderators are welcome too!

Clementvidal (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Restored the stubbification; too much WP:FRINGE-violating material. A total rewrite is needed per Fringe_theories/Noticeboard. VQuakr (talk) 19:55, 20 February 2020 (UTC)
 * The burden of proof is on those who wish to advance a fringe theory as respectable. The demand that we explain and argue in detail all [our] points is asking for lessons in basic physics, which is not what Wikipedia's talk pages are for. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 20:16, 20 February 2020 (UTC)


 * There was absolutely no consensus in favor of restoring the deleted material. Your superficial changes do not address the fundamental problem that this is a non-notable idea. You assert that I contradict myself by saying that scale relativity does not stand out in the scientific literature while also observing that "the claims of what it explains are impossibly wide-ranging and grandiose". There is no contradiction here. "Theories" that make wide-ranging and grandiose claims are commonplace. I am restoring the consensus version again. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 14:32, 7 April 2020 (UTC)


 * About consensus, I think we need to put things in perspective. A detailed version was available since May 31 2015. It was then gradually improved since then by many wikipedia contributors during almost 5 years. To me, this version thus seems to have been the consensus. Based on an open suggestion by VQuakr ("this is a notable subject (that is in need of a complete rewrite). Methinks stubbify and start over? (talk) 01:48, 4 February 2020 (UTC))", you rather boldly decided to indeed "stubbify" (=delete almost everything) of the article, leading to a basic, uninformative -and I would add biased- stub version. I propose to stick with the terms "detailed version" and "stub version" as the term that you used "consensus version" is obviously ambiguous.
 * Regarding your statement that "Your superficial changes do not address the fundamental problem that this is a non-notable idea". First, the "superficial changes" are really useful and relevant, so thanks again for triggering them. I did address above the issue of notability through h-index and citation counts considerations, so I'm not repeating them here. Regarding whether you contradict yourself or not, if you believe a priori that the theory is wrong, then you're absolutely correct, you don't contradict yourself, and I'm sorry that this hurt your feelings.
 * Where do we go from there? XOR&#39;easter and I obviously disagree. As I explicitly wrote in my replies above, I'm not denying that the article can be improved, and I'm willing to go forward and help. The question is thus: is it better to start from scratch with the stub version or the detailed version? Can we try to reach a consensus on this? What do others think? Should we organize a vote?Clementvidal (talk) 09:40, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, a total rewrite is needed. A consensus has already been reached on the fringe noticeboard, so rehashing that decision here isn't productive. See WP:TNT. The new version of this article will need to use mainstream sources nearly exclusively, with sourcing from or related to Nottale used sparingly and always in support of sources with a mainstream perspective. See WP:FRINGE for a relevant guideline, particularly the section WP:FRIND. VQuakr (talk) 19:11, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I did address above the issue of notability through h-index and citation counts considerations, so I'm not repeating them here. No, the issue of notability is not addressed. Reporting raw citation numbers from something so easily gamed as Google Scholar is not a useful course of action for fringe topics. We need substantial discussion in secondary and tertiary sources outside the coterie of enthusiasts. Virtually none exist. The point of providing a link to Physics Overflow, a forum with much useful content but definitely not what we would consider a reliable source, is that there's nothing better &mdash; because nobody cares. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 21:01, 9 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Gaming h-index or citations is nearly impossible. Citations are obviously secondary sources, so you have it all wrong here. Nottale only has 5319 citations as of today, so 5319 (minus self-citations if you want to be rigorous) secondary sources, that care about the theory. Clementvidal (talk) 09:12, 28 April 2020 (UTC)
 * I delimited the above post with a box because it was very confusing. There are embedded copy-pasted messages and signatures, suggesting that other people have posted in between, but it's not the case. — Paleo  Neonate  – 08:45, 8 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Thank you it was not obvious to me how to make such replies clearer.Clementvidal (talk) 09:40, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

The contents of the article are BRUTALLY deleted. There is absolutely no scientific consensus about this. All I see are unfounded opinions of anonymous editors. Most of them probably have no scientific credentials. For me, this is a reprehensible manifestation of groupthink and thought police mentality. I intend to start a dispute resolution if this "war of words" continues. //DP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.49.65.90 (talk) 16:42, 25 April 2020 (UTC)
 * Agreed. Clementvidal (talk) 09:18, 28 April 2020 (UTC)