User:Duae Quartunciae/W. Kehler/Statement

I think attempts at communication have broken down; so I am collecting together my own statements on the matter, in case I want to put them in a form for curious readers from outside. So far this page is not linked.

Fairness in wikipedia
Understanding the official wikipedia policies and guidelines is essential to working effectively with the wikipedia community.
 *  Neutral point of view is the core wikipedia fairness policy. I continue to follow it to the best of my ability.
 *  Undue weight is part of the official neutral point of view policy. Neutrality is not a way to fix up a bias in the rest of the world. Views are given the same weight in the encyclopedia as they have in the rest of the world.
 *  Fringe theories is a wikipedia content guideline. The prominence of an idea in wikipedia is not based on whether it is true or not, but on the level of recognition in mainstream publications. You cannot use wikipedia as a way of giving prominence to an issue that you think is unfairly treated in the mainstream.
 *  No original research means you can't use wikipedia as a way to publish your ideas. It may only refer to ideas already published elsewhere.
 *  No original synthesis is a part of the core no original research policy. You may not make your own novel interpretations of sources you are citing.
 *  Verifiability means that claims in a wikipedia article should be verified by citation to a  reliable source.

DeepBlueDiamond has a lot to say about "administrators", but I don't think there has been any administrator involvement at all. Everything that has occurred has been the normal process of editing by ordinary editors.

No one is perfect; and editors often to do the wrong thing according to wikipedia principles. For example, DeepBlueDiamond has noted that some editors referred to him as a "vandal", for continuing to add material against consensus. In that case, DeepBlueDiamond was failing to following wikipedia  consensus guidelines; and other editors were failing to follow  Assume Good Faith guidelines. There is a whole dispute resolution process to manage these things, and administrators only get involved when there is a need to step in a ban someone for being intransigent, or to protect a page against repeated badly-considered edits.

DeepBlueDiamond thinks he has followed these guidelines, and the fault is with others. He's wrong about that. His edits have been consistently inadequate because of WP:POV, WP:OR, and WP:V. He's got major problems with WP:FRINGE and WP:WEIGHT. His behaviour consistently violates WP:CIVIL.

Wikipedia is the wrong place to try and fix general problems of mainstream and conventional thinking. It is an encyclopedia, and so it mainly reflects mainstream and conventional thinking.

Special interest groups
I do not speak on behalf of any group. I do not speak on behalf of the Physics Wikiproject. If I occasionally make comments about the Physics Wikiproject, they are only descriptive, based only on personal assumptions and personal observations of tendencies within the group. My comments have no standing or authority. I merely signed up as an interested party; any other editor may do the same.

Wikipedia prefers all editors to work as individuals. The projects are simply groups of people with common interests. The differences you have with the physics group are not because the group is stacked against you; but because the group is not stacked at all.

IP hunting
Looking for 84.158.2??.* edits is not an unwarranted imposition. It merely brings the IP range up to a comparable level of visibility that normal editors have. Every time I sign an edit, for example, I give a one click link to a log of all my contributions.

There has been a long history of problems with edits from the 84.158.2*.* range, extending well before I joined wikipedia. I have found the edits from that source to be consistently erroneous, in need of basic repair on English, and in conflict with wikipedia guidelines on neutrality and verifiability. No offense is intended by that. There has not been any campaign, as far as I know, to find and revert all your edits. Most of your edits get reverted in the normal course of editing in wikipedia, without any need for co-ordinated campaigns, because of their obvious inadequacies. There has been no administrator intervention to remove your edits.

Photon mass
The German Wikipedia, and the English wikipedia, and I, and most modern texts on relativity, all use the same terminology. We all understand and help to explain different terminology that was used in the past. There is no difference in the underlying physics; only in the words we prefer to use for describing it. This whole "dispute" is a storm in a tea cup, over comparatively inconsequential word usage.

I know that the relativistic mass of a photon is hf/c^2. This has never been in the slightest dispute, by anyone. We just tend to use the term "mass" for the intrinsic mass of the photon, rather than the relativistic mass. The intrinsic mass is zero.

The field equation for relativity, which is how we model gravity, uses a stress-energy tensor. Newtonian gravity, however, used mass. You can convert between mass and energy as you like; and it was very common in the past to calculate the relativistic mass of a photon from its energy, and use that as a measure of its effects on gravity. These days it is more common to treat energy as the fundamental quality for gravity, and so a mass gets represented as energy using E = mc^2, rather than taking the energy of a photon and representing it as a mass, using m = E/c^2. This is a matter of convention, and it's not hard to map from one set of terminology to the other when necessary.

The German wikipedia is using the same standard terminology that I use. There is no sentence in the German wikipedia that could possibly be translated "A ZERO REST MASS MAKES NO SENSE". In fact, it is just the reverse.

A photon has a zero rest mass (Photonen niemals und können daher keine Ruhemasse tragen). A photon carries no rest mass (zerfallen Photonen niemals und können daher keine Ruhemasse tragen). You can express the photon energy as a "relativistic mass" (kann einem Photon eine relativistische Masse zugeordnet werden, da für die Energie eines Photons stets). Follow the link in the German page for relativistic mass, and you will see, just as I have been saying all along, that the term "relativistic mass" reflects older terminological conventions (ist eine Interpretation verschiedener Gleichungen aus den Anfangstagen). We don't tend to use the term today (In der theoretischen Physik wird das Konzept der relativistischen Masse heute nicht mehr verwendet.)

Whether you speak of the energy as a relativistic mass or not is just terminology. Someone who understands the underlying physics, which in this case is not at all difficult, should have little trouble understanding either convention. An encyclopedia should be guided by modern usage. It should explain older usage. Someone who fails to grasp the physics will probably get confused by the changes in conventions over the years, but the difference emphatically does NOT correspond to differences in theories about gravity, or to errors in the science of those who use words a bit differently. To understand this you just need to get your head around the physics. Then the minor terminological differences take their proper perspective.

As an aside, the possibility of a very small non-zero rest mass for photons is something that is seriously considered. It would involve a significant change to current particle physics, but that's okay. The mass involved is tiny; far far smaller than the relativistic mass.

Tired light and Einstein effect theories

 * 1) None of the tired light models mentioned use Einstein effects. The Einstein effect refers to gravitational lensing; and to the gravitational redshift in light emerging from a gravitational well. Zwicky in 1929 noted explicitly that the Einstein effect does not depend on distance, and so cannot address cosmological redshift. Zwicky was correct. None of the other papers DeepBlueDiamond cites use the Einstein effect to explain cosmological redshift either.
 * 2) The Zwicky's 1929 paper has never been removed from his biography. The paper explicitly considers well known processes such as the Einstein effect, and photon electron interactions. Zwicky explains, correctly, why these processes cannot possibly give rise to the cosmological redshift. Zwicky proposes a gravitational drag effect instead.
 * 3) There has been no falsified history with respect to Edwin Hubble. His skeptism of the expanding space explanation for redshift is well known and plainly stated in his Wikipedia biography. The cosmological redshift that he observed, however, is evidence in good standing for expanding space.
 * 4) Professor Assis does support the idea of tired light, but he does not have an actual model to explain it. This is explicit in his paper The Redshift Revisited. The Tired light page focuses on other papers which do propose models.
 * 5) Erhard Scholz has written an interesting paper: Another look at the pioneer anomaly. At present it is uploaded to arxiv, but not published and so not a reliable source. Scholz gives a mathematical model; but no mechanism to justify the effect. By Scholz' own account, it is speculative; not proved at all. That's fine; good science can begin with speculations.
 * 6) Jim Jastrzebski's ideas have no acceptance, and have yet to be published in the scientific literature. Jim is supremely confident of his insight, and thinks that there must be some form of psychological block with everyone else that prevents his ideas from being recognized. Be that as it may, his ideas are not notable by the Wikipedia guidelines on verifiability and neutrality.
 * 7) The ideas of "private researcher" Lyndon Ashmore are also not notable by Wikipedia guidelines. This was the model that received most prominence in old versions of the Zwicky biography, despite it being an example of the scattering process that Zwicky himself correctly described as hopeless, and despite it having no associated reliable sources. I have given a brief summary of the many trivial errors in Ashmore's physics in.
 * 8) Paul Marmet does have a tired light model; but what DeepBlueDiamond cites here is a self-published book, which does not appear to address cosmological redshift at all. The book is an error filled criticism of Einstein's theory of relativity. Marmet's tired light proposals are similarly confused; and uninfluential even amongst the small number of scientists actively considering tired light mechanisms. Marmet proposes a kind of scattering process with regular matter of the very kind that Zwicky identifed as "hopeless" in 1929. The right place to mention Marmet's model would be the Tired light page; but Marmet's model is less notable than other more rational speculations already present in that page.
 * 9) Arp's paper on "intrinsic redshift" is not about tired light or gravitational redshifts. Arp proposes that some of the redshift apparent in high-z objects is localized at the objects themselves. This is already described in pages on Halton Arp, and Intrinsic redshift.
 * 10) DeepBlueDiamond cites an important book by Hoyle, Burbidge and Narlikar. This is already cited at the page where it belongs, on Steady state cosmology. It does not use a tired light model, and it has nothing to do with Einstein effects.

Ashmore's model
Lyndon Ashmore has developed his own model for a tired light effect, involving an interaction of photons with electrons in the plasmas of deep space. He has produced a website lyndonashmore.com, and written a self-published book, and got one paper into a notorious fringe journal. You can confirm all my remarks here by reading the preprint of his "paper": Recoil Interaction Between Photons and The Electrons In The Plasma Of Intergalactic Space Leading To The Hubble Constant And CMB. He has no notability in the world of science at all. His paper is riddled with elementary errors.

Ashmore takes some ideas from the interaction of photons with a solid lattice, misunderstands it even in its own context, and then applies the mangled confusion without rhyme or reason to the interaction of photons with free electrons in deep space. Ashmore speaks of what he calls a double Mössbauer effect. The "double" refers to an electron "absorbing" a photon, and then "re-emitting" the photon. (I'm not kidding.) Ashmore suggests that the photon somehow proceeds with reduced energy and no change in direction; with the electron eventually radiating away the extra energy in what Ashmore calls "Bremsstrahlung". This argument was also added to the Zwicky biography, and cited to Ashmore.

In reality, the Mössbauer effect occurs when photons are scattered by atoms in a solid lattice, in such a way that the entire lattice recoils from the interaction. Since the lattice is so much more massive than the photon, there is effectively no loss of energy from the photon, and it can be scattered at any angle with the same frequency. This is in contrast to recoil from a single particle, in which case a small amount of energy is transferred to the particle, giving a red shift to the photon, dependent on the scattering angle. Also important to the Mössbauer effect is that scattering depends on the photon having an energy that matches energy levels for electrons in the lattice, so that the scattered photon continues to have that same matching energy for further scattering within the lattice.


 * Ashmore has taken interactions that depend crucially upon electrons being bound to atoms with particular energy levels, and applied them to free electrons in diffuse plasma.
 * Ashmore has taken the "no recoil" aspect of the Mössbauer effect, meaning that the lattice does not recoil, and taken it as meaning the photon does not change direction. He has it backwards; with a Mössbauer effect, photons are scattered at any angle you like, with no redshift.
 * Ashmore speaks of "bremsstrahlung", which is radiation from an accelerated charge. He speaks of the electron having been given some energy by the interaction, which it then gives up as it is somehow decelerated back to rest. (I am not kidding. He does say "brought to rest" in the context of intergalactic plasmas.)
 * Ashmore has never done a balanced budget of energy and momentum for his proposed photon electron interaction. He proposes that the photon gives up a small amount of energy to the electron, but with no change of direction. It is impossible to balance the energy and momentum in this interaction.
 * This only touches on those errors that are directly relevant to errors that were introduced into the Zwicky biography. There are plenty more errors in Ashmore's paper.

In 1929 Fritz Zwicky explicitly identified scattering processes from electrons or ions as unable to explain cosmological redshift for precisely the energy momentum related reasons that Ashmore gets so badly wrong. Zwicky was correct to reject these processes as hopeless.

The Ashmore issue is a litmus test for basic competence in physics. If someone defends the validity of Ashmore's ideas without having read them, then they are just making trouble. If someone defends the validity of Ashmore's ideas after having read them, then they don't understand elementary physics.

Truth in scientific journals
This ludicrous claim is without the slightest merit.

I'm being a bit emphatic here; but I don't actually intend to attack persons individually. I appreciate how Jim affirms his claim in the face of my reaction; and I am content to leave this as two different perspectives, side by side.

Pragmatically, however, it is not going to make a difference whether journals are able to publish the "truth" or not. By its very nature, wikipedia is unable to address this problem, even if you think there is a problem. An encyclopedia is inherently conservative, and primarily reflects established knowledge with all its imperfections. The guidelines of no original research and  verifiability ensure that wikipedia will continue to reflect the same features of the conventional scientific establishment that you deem so untruthful.

Articles on field equations of relativity
This is not an issue in which I have had any involvement. The changes to which DeepBlueDiamond refers all took place, and were reverted again, before I had anything to do with wikipedia.

Looking at it, I can see why DeepBlueDiamond feels frustrated; but I can also see why his edits were removed.

Three of his six "solutions" were not solutions of the field equations at all; they were a pretty obvious attempt to insert his point of view into articles where they were not actually relevant. That is the references to Arp, to Zwicky, and to Burbidge were not actually about the topic of the page at all. None of them are examples of mathematical solutions to the field equations, and so they were bound to be deleted as off topic. The other three instances referred to known solutions, each of which is already well described in its own page on wikipedia, and actually linked from the page if you look for the cosmology infobox on the right hand side. The three valid additions by DeepBlueDiamond were poorly written and not well located within the structure of the article, but they could have been improved and made into a good addition.

DeepBlueDiamond's additions were not vandalism, and it was a violation of WP:CIVIL for other editors to describe them as vandalism in edit comments.

I think editors must have seen that only less than half of the additions were usable, and even that required significant re-writing. But in my view, the editors would have been better to modify rather that delete wholesale.

There is a bit of history to these pages of which you may not be aware. There are some really first rate relativity experts who were actively trying to put together an excellent set of pages on relativity related topics. Most of them became frustrated and gave up; mostly because of continual revisions and quibbles from people &mdash; like DeepBlueDiamond, frankly &mdash; with a poor grasp of physics and an agenda to insert fringe ideas well beyond their due proportionate share under the neutral point of view guidelines. The whole issue of the extent to which experts should be the ones to control content is rather vexed.

Be that as it may, I still think there is scope to improve these articles with a mention of some of the important solutions, and that DeepBlueDiamond's addition had within it some useful steps to that end.

Issues with many articles
Most of this complaint is not relevant to me. I am not an administrator. I have had no part in most of the issues listed.

There are processes available for an editor to complain about unreasonable treatment; but merely being reverted is not unreasonable. It happens all the time, and it seems to me that all your reverts have been the result of perfectly ordinary day to day activity by other editors; with no special wikipedia administrator involved at all. Complaining to me is totally futile. I don't have any standing to do anything about it, even if I thought you had a valid complaint.

There are a couple of comments I can make, however.
 * With respect to the Zwicky biography, DeepBlueDiamond complains that Nowhere was realized that and how Feynman had declared for amorphous glass (as most commonly known transparent matter) that there exist quantum effect exceptions that even he could not declare or teach his students.
 * On the contrary. I realized what Feynman said just fine. Feynman's comments bear no relation whatsoever to tired light, and making that association was a clear case of " original research by synthesis". The attempt to use Feynman's lectures as a basis for ignoring the physical impossibility of tired light by a scattering process was profoundly ignorant of elementary physics. Feynman's work is just fine. The association of that work with tired light models is ridiculous.


 * DeepBluedDiamond continues to get the photon mass issue wrong; but we have a separate section for that.
 * The comments DeepBlueDiamond continues to make about the supposed 120 decades error is not an error at all; but rather an unresolved question in quantum mechanics about vacuum energy density. Order of magnitude approximations for energy density based on quantum mechanics give a result 120 orders of magnitude larger than what we actually observe. It's not a problem with the Big Bang, but it is an indication of something we still don't know about quantum mechanics. The issue is discussed in some detail at the page Zero-point energy, and this page is already prominently linked from many other pages where it is relevant; including pages relating to cosmology. It is an unsolved problem in physics; and discarding the Big Bang model does nothing whatsoever to address the problem. The zero-point energy is observed to be very close to zero. The Big Bang is consistent with the kinds of magnitude that are observed.

Contributions from 84.158.*.*
Here is an example of information extracted from the edits of 84.158.*.*. Because there is no stable IP address, edits are not able to be reviewed as they are for any normal registered editor. For example, you can get all my edits very easily with a single click. For the astronomy club, one needs to scan the wikipedia database. There are tools to help do this. Here is some extracted information, with everything earlier than May 2007 removed. Most of these edits are from the German astronomy club; especially those in range 84.158.2??.* but you still really need to look at the whole range.

Other pages not apparently having anything to do with astronomy club issues: Rudolf_Alfred_Bosshardt, Rion_Steiner, Galerians, Maquoketa,_Iowa, Babel_Proclamation, Muse_(band), William_L._Harding, Egon_Krenz, Lip_piercing, Pretty_Fly_(for_a_White_Guy), Template:Bundesautobahn, Erasermate, Dodo, IsoHunt, Ireland, Talk:Jenna_Jameson, Gottschee_County, List_of_Wii_games, Talk:George_W._Bush, Talk:You_Only_Move_Twice, Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Star_Wars:_Secrets_of_the_Rebellion, Arcturus, Cornel_West, Forum_spam, Hillsong_Music, Malicious_Records, Electronic_data_capture, Makoto_Raiku, Sport_in_Ireland, Emmingen-Liptingen, Ho-Oh, Arceus, RQ-4_Global_Hawk, Mathias_Loras, Saint_Joseph's_Catholic_Church_(Sugar_Creek), History_of_Dubuque,_Iowa, Sat.1, Jordanhill, Ron_Gardenhire, Mike_Blowers, Jeff_Baker, Will_Ohman, Techno, Chex_Quest, Lucario, Bronzor, Dialga, Sonic_Youth, Misia, Two-way_radio, Chiranjeevi, Empoleon, Prinplup, Infernape, Piplup, K._A._Paul, Swimsuit, Roserade, Lufthansa, United_States_Air_Force

And, of course: User:Duae_Quartunciae/W._Kehler/Issues, User_talk:Duae_Quartunciae, User:Duae_Quartunciae/W._Kehler, User:Duae_Quartunciae