Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Frank L. Lambert


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   keep. T. Canens (talk) 21:13, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Frank L. Lambert

 * – ( View AfD View log  •  )

Original Research, NPOV, Notability Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 22:39, 27 June 2010 (UTC)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lambert This appears to be a self-promotional article. Worse, it promotes the subjects website, which itself gives a false impression that Lambert's controversial opinion (“entropy is not disorder”) had become generally accepted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Spam/COIReports/2008,_Feb_7 01:23:22, Thu Feb 07, 2008 - user:FrankLambert (contribs; 1/1) scores 100% (U->P) & 92.3% (P->U) (ratio: 92.3%) on calculated overlap FrankLambert <-> Frank L. Lambert (Frank L. Lambert - diff - COIBot UserReport)

I believe that this article is just a thinly disguised link to Professor Lambert's website, http://entropysimple.oxy.edu/, which promotes the controversial assertion that “entropy is not disorder”. Dr Lambert asserts that only “a minority of US general chemistry texts for majors still describe entropy in terms of 'disorder' “ I believe that this is a conttoversial assertion, based on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy “Entropy is a measure of how disorganized a system is.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28order_and_disorder%29 In thermodynamics, entropy is commonly associated with the amount of order, disorder, and/or chaos in a thermodynamic system To highlight the fact that order and disorder are commonly understood to be measured in terms of entropy, below are current science encyclopedia and science dictionary definitions of entropy: Entropy – a measure of the unavailability of a system’s energy to do work; also a measure of disorder; the higher the entropy the greater the disorder.[5] Entropy – a measure of disorder; the higher the entropy the greater the disorder.[6] Entropy – in thermodynamics, a parameter representing the state of disorder of a system at the atomic, ionic, or molecular level; the greater the disorder the higher the entropy.[7] Entropy – a measure of disorder in the universe or of the availability of the energy in a system to do work.[8]

Reference Links in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Lambert : 1, 9, 11 broken links 2 ,3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12 are all links to Professor Lambert's website, http://entropysimple.oxy.edu/. That website does include reprints of Professor Lambert's articles from the Journal of Chemical Education and The Chemical Educator, along with his other assertions, which are not peer reviewed. 4 unsourced footnote making a controversial statement “Although all U.S. chemistry texts for first-year university classes prior to 1999 had some sort of illustration of a disorderly room, or shuffled cards, or a mixture of red and green marbles as depictions of “increased entropy”, in 2007 no major text used such illustrations.” 10 (not referenced in the body of the article) is a link to the first page of the course catalog for Occidental College. 13 http://shakespeare2ndlaw.oxy.edu/ (Another of Professor Lambert's websites.) 14 is a legitimate link directly to a 2002 article by Professor Lambert on the website of the Journal of Chemical Education The External Link, “Entropy Is Simple — If We Avoid The Briar Patches!” is another link to Professor Lambert's website, http://entropysimple.oxy.edu/

This article is linked to by 2 other articles which I believe should also be deleted:

This article seems to be original research from Frank Lambert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28energy_dispersal%29

I suspect that this article has been heavily modified by Frank Lambert. See the talk page for some valid objections to the Lambert influence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_entropy


 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Academics and educators-related deletion discussions.  —Nsk92 (talk) 23:51, 27 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep. Now that all the earlier arguments about Frank Lambert's ideas in entropy articles are long past, it is time to clean up this article. I will try to have a go at it in a couple of days, but welcome others having a go. Nevertheless, he is notable, because his efforts to change the way entropy is taught to chemists has resulted in major changes to the major textbooks used across the world and this is recognised in those texts and elsewere. There have been no comparable changes to texts on physical chemistry for several decades as physical chemistry is generally recognised as well settled. It does not matter whether Lambert is wrong or right. "Objections to the Lambert influence" affect the articles about his influence on entropy, not this article on the man himself. He has had an influence and it is a notable one. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  00:30, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * weak keep -- I'm inclined to think this one passes WP:PROF, and any need for revision per nom's complaints does not really constitute an argument for deletion. Nomoskedasticity (talk) 07:29, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Science-related deletion discussions.  -- • Gene93k (talk) 15:31, 28 June 2010 (UTC)

Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 22:50, 28 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete "his efforts to change the way entropy is taught to chemists has resulted in major changes to the major textbooks used across the world and this is recognised in those texts and elsewhere." I have seen no evidence for that.  All the "references" just link to Frank Lambert's own website.  Please show me a short quote from any chemistry textbook where the author acknowledges that he has been influenced by Frank Lambert.  A handful of articles 20 years ago in the Journal of Chemical Education do not make him "notable".
 * A good example is the text "Physical Chemistry" by Peter Atkins (with another author in later editions), which clearly adopts Lambert's ideas. He may not directly acknowledge that, but I'm sure there are other sources that points out that he has. Atkins' text is one of the major Physical Chemistry texts. I will try to address this later in the week, but I am busy now. It does not look as if you know about the teaching of physical chemistry. You might have a look there. I would suggest that !voting "delete" by starting several comments with the bolded word "delete" is bad form. You can comment here without doing that. Your nomination is quite clear. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  12:40, 29 June 2010 (UTC)

I guess the Journal of Chemical Information forgot to update their website after Lambert set them straight. They missed the trend that was launched in their own journal. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk • contribs) 02:54, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete the "Introduction to Entropy" article contains the statement: "More recently there has been a trend in chemistry and physics textbooks to describe entropy in terms of 'dispersal of energy'."  This is unsourced original research.  Where has this so-called "trend" been documented and published?  What if an "Introduction to Evolution" article tried to get away with saying "More recently there has been a trend in biology textbooks to describe Creationism has a better alternative to Evolution"?   Such an anti-Darwinian trend could be backed up, as this article backs up the anti-Boltzmann trend, by referring to a few personal websites and a handful of inferior textbooks (from Texas, in the case of the alleged anti-Darwinian trend).  —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk • contribs) 02:42, 29 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I have struck out this and the next "delete" since you already expressed your opinion in favor of deletion in the nomination statement and in the previous comment. You are welcome to comment multiple times but please indicate subsequent comments with "comment" instead of "delete" so that the closing admin can more clearly see what level of support the nomination has. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:32, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Delete "Entropy is a measure of disorder" http://jchemed.chem.wisc.edu/JCESoft/CCA/CCA3/MAIN/ENTROPY/PAGE1.HTM


 *  Comment Keep The issue here is whether the subject passes WP:PROF. Probably yes on criterion #4, if the case can be made a little more clearly. -- Radagast 3 (talk) 03:38, 29 June 2010 (UTC)


 *  Comment I don't have a copy of the 8th edition of Atkins's Physical Chemistry, but I do have a copy of the 7th edition. Page 91: "We shall see, in fact, that collapse into disorder accounts for change in all its forms." Page 92: "We shall see that the entropy (which we shall define shortly, but is a measure of the molecular disorder of the system) lets us assess whether one state is accessible to another by a spontaneous change." On his website, Lambert claims: "A minority of US general chemistry texts for majors still describe entropy in terms of “disorder” – an unfortunate subjective concept whose source appears to be a naïve statement by Boltzmann."   The reason I'm so upset about this issue is that I've read and enjoyed Atkins's "The Second Law" and I've been looking forward (after I complete an intensive review of calculus, physics, and basic chemistry) to studying my copy of the 7th edition of "Physical Chemistry".  But if it's really true that Atkins's has completely reversed himself on such a fundamental issue, then I'll have to toss out my copy of "Physical Chemistry" and look for a more reliable author. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 03:56, 30 June 2010 (UTC)
 * I can not access Atkins' 8th edition this week, but it does make extensive use of Lambert's ideas and several other text books do also. Lambert's ideas are not the only story, but they are part of the story and the way entropy is best taught to chemists. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  05:25, 30 June 2010 (UTC)


 * Just to clarify, Lambert isn't changing the definition of entropy, which is a mathematical one, but he is changing the way the concept is presented verbally at an introductory level. That's why the main impact is on introductory textbooks and popular science writing, not on advanced-level publications. However, the impact he has had is a clear pass of WP:PROF #4, in my opinion. -- Radagast 3 (talk) 03:12, 1 July 2010 (UTC)

"The common theme in the notability guidelines is that there must be verifiable objective evidence that the subject has received significant attention to support a claim of notability." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-notable Since no one has yet presented any evidence to support Professor Lambert's notoriety, I propose that, instead of voting to keep based solely on undocumented opinion, we should defer the vote until somebody has had time to find some evidence for keeping the article: an acknowledgment of Lambert in a textbook, or a journal article by somebody other than Lambert that cites one of his articles. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 10:39, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Defer the vote for another week.

http://www.amazon.com/review/R1N6XF1PO5P0Z7 Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 13:24, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * On Amazon, Frank Lambert posted a very negative review of Arieh Ben Naim's "Entropy Demystified". In his response to that review, Professor Ben Naim quotes a letter he had previously received from Lambert after he had sent Lambert an advance copy of the manuscript with a request for comments:  "...your goal was to write a ms. to destroy me and the sea-change in chemistry texts that I had achieved in the last decade. Unbelievable chicanery".  Ben Naim's response on Amazon is followed by a long series of additional comments by Frank Lambert.  Please read them and decide for yourself.

Custom edition for Glendale Community College of Chemistry by John E. McMurry and Robert C Fay, Fifth Edition, copyright 2008
 * "Entropy (S) the amount of molecular randomness in a system" - Glossary, G4

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_E._McMurry The author of more than 100 research papers, Professor McMurry is best known scientifically for his development of the McMurry reaction... McMurry was elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1985 and received a Max Planck Society Research Award in 1991.

In addition to his scientific work, McMurry is the author of numerous undergraduate chemistry textbooks. More than 2.2 million copies of his books in eleven languages have been used throughout the world. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 19:01, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * Keep. There is sufficient evidence in the literature that he has had a significant influence in how entropy is taught and thereby passes WP:PROF. The nominator seems mainly to be arguing that Lambert's ideas are wrong, but this is irrelevant for determining whether they are notable. —David Eppstein (talk) 20:35, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I am not arguing whether his ideas are right or wrong. I'm waiting to see even a single published reference cited for the claim that "he has had a significant influence in how entropy is taught." Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 21:00, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I don't have access to Scopus, but it's available to university faculty and students. Could one of you please use Scopus to check whether any of Professor Lambert's published articles has ever been cited by any article written by anyone besides himself?  That would constitute at least some evidence for his influence. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 21:26, 1 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Weak delete. People have said that there is a significant amount of evidence for FLL's impact on the way entropy is taught and thus that he qualified by rule #4 of WP:PROF. My only problem is... where is this evidence? At this moment there are 8 citations of this in the lead. However, if we examine the sources closely. Citation [1] is a broken link to a CV, citations [2]-[7] are publications of FLL, most of them with him as sole author, and citation [8] is original research. It is clear that FLL works and promotes viewing entropy in this alternative way, but it is not at all clear that this has had a major impact on how entropy is taught at most universities. If someone can find several credible sources (that are not original research, or FLL's publications) then I will change my vote. (Also, Ray Eston Smith Jr... chill... you have made your point, you are starting to look a bit hostile) --DFRussia (talk) 21:31, 1 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I used this search to find scholarly publications about Chemistry education that are based on Lambert's work but are not by Lambert, such as 10.1021/ed081p639.2 and 10.1021/ed081p1585. I have to assume that the amount of activity actually teaching according to Lambert's ideas is significantly greater than the amount of activity writing about teaching about it. —David Eppstein (talk) 01:08, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * What about the quote in [16]: "The work of Frank Lambert, integrated into virtually all recent chemistry textbooks, makes clear that the second law is really a matter of energy dispersal"? -- Radagast 3 (talk) 05:08, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I would explicitly include the word education (http://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&q=education+lambert+entropy+-author:lambert+-%22lambert+function%22&btnG=Search&as_sdt=2000&as_ylo=&as_vis=0). Can somebody find a way of working this into the article? --DFRussia (talk) 09:01, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * Keep with changes In light of the above references I change my vote to "keep".  However, the articles should be modified to remove the impression that Lambert's ideas have replaced the idea of "entropy as disorder" in the majority of textbooks, unless somebody can cite published research on textbook content which supports that conclusion.  Based on the above references (which should be cited in the article), he can be said to have influenced the teaching of entropy (and the content of some textbooks, if specific mentions of Lambert in textbooks can be found), but any "sea change" is a matter of opinion until documented by published research in peer-reviewed journals.  All that a Wikipedia article can say is that there are some textbooks which use the idea of disorder and some that don't. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 01:37, 2 July 2010 (UTC)


 * This link (http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/summary/303/5664/1589c) should probably be included as a reference in the Lambert article. It's an item in Science magazine linking to Lambert's website.  That's much more credible than a direct link to his website. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 01:54, 2 July 2010 (UTC)

Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 02:24, 2 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I have to add a couple personal comments. I started this deletion process in good faith, because (1) these articles lacked proper Wikipedia references, and (2) the articles make a couple claims which I still believe to be false: (a) that the majority of textbooks no longer explain entropy as disorder, and (b) that "energy dispersion" is a better explanation. (Although point (b) is irrelevant for deciding whether to keep the articles.)  I believe that Boltzmann was on the right track with "entropy is disorder,"  although, pending further reading, I am inclined toward Professor Ben Naim's position that "lost information" is a better explanation.  The Lambert article should be kept, because apparently he has been influential, even though, in my opinion (which matters only to me), that influence has been harmful.

Lynn Margulis is a recognized and respected authority on biology, but she is not an authority on what constitutes "mainstream chemistry". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis#Controversy, "In addition to rejecting Neo-Darwinian evolution as an explanation for diversity (on the grounds that speciation due solely to random mutation and differential survival has yet to be proven), Margulis holds a number of opinions outside of mainstream science....In 2009 she also pushed the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) to publish a paper by Donald I. Williamson...As a member of the National Academy of Sciences, Margulis has the ability to "communicate" scientific papers, allowing them to be published with minimal review. Williamson's paper provoked immediate response from the scientific community, including a paper in PNAS [10]. Developmental Biologist and Professor at Duke university Fred Nijhout was quoted as saying that the paper was better suited for "National Enquirer than the National Academy.". Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 19:47, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The quote ("work of Frank Lambert, integrated into virtually all recent chemistry textbooks") from Lynn Margulis should be included in the article, but as a direct quote, not as an encyclopedic statement of fact. One assertion in a popular science book (for which her only source may have been Frank Lambert himself) does not make it a generally accepted fact.

[For most of the 20th century textbooks tended to describe entropy as "disorder", following Boltzmann's early conceptualisation of the motional energy of molecules. More recently there has been a trend in chemistry and physics textbooks to describe entropy in terms of "dispersal of energy".] [Traditionally, 20th century textbooks have introduced entropy as order and disorder so that it provides "a measurement of the disorder or randomness of a system". It has been argued that ambiguities in the terms used (such as "disorder" and "chaos") contribute to widespread confusion and can hinder comprehension of entropy for most students. A more recent formulation associated with Frank L. Lambert describing entropy as energy dispersal describes entropy as measuring "the spontaneous dispersal of energy — at a specific temperature."] Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 20:17, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * For the "Introduction to Entropy" article, the Wikipedia editorial community will have to make a judgement on the truth of Lambert's assertion that disorder should not be mentioned in introductory treatments of chemistry. If Lambert is judged to be correct, then "disorder" should not be mentioned in "Introduction to Entropy" - it would only confuse the readers.  Whatever the decision on that issue, this is an introduction to entropy, not an article on methods of teaching (or not teaching) about entropy and/or disorder in high schools. Therefore the following statements should be removed from the article:


 * Radagast3 has considerably improved the "Frank Lambert" article. I see only one remaining problem: Note 4 [^  Although all U.S. chemistry texts for first-year university classes prior to 1999 had some sort of illustration of a disorderly room, or shuffled cards, or a mixture of red and green marbles as depictions of “increased entropy”, in 2007 no major text used such illustrations.] "Some sort of illustration" implies any explanation based on disorder. This has no source other than Frank Lambert's personal website. "No major text used such illustrations" is non peer-review-published original research on all "major texts" and a subjective opinion on what constitutes a "major text". In a previous comment, I quoted McMurry's 2008 textbook, along with objective evidence suggesting that it is a "major text." Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 20:40, 3 July 2010 (UTC)
 * I think you are correct about that quote and I will look at this later today (early here in Oz right now). Getting sources on texbooks is not easy as nobody reviews all of them together or carries out investigations of what book covers what approach. However, I would not give a lot of weight to McMurry. His massive sales are from books on organic chemistry, not physical chemistry. I will also be able to access Atkins tomorrow. Relative to the above, he starts off on entropy with the bouncing ball, where dispersal of energy is more intelligible than increasing disorder. Others have done likewise, replacing the shuffled cards, or similar. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  22:59, 3 July 2010 (UTC)

[PDF] Different Senses of Entropy—Implications for Education File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - Quick View Abstract: A challenge in the teaching of entropy is that the word has several ... potentially misleading or uninformative when used with the uninitiated. ... www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/3/490/pdf This article, which mentions Lambert several times including in the final summary paragraph, has clear descriptions and evaluations of 5 alternative ways to describe entropy. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 03:13, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * If there is a new article on how introductory entropy should be taught, I believe it would be useful to refer to this 2010 article:


 * Although the article I linked to above ("Different Senses of Entropy—Implications for Education") seemed to be well-written, I'm now uncertain about the credibility of the MDPI Journal. See the discussion page for the Gibbs Paradox Wikipedia article. It looks like user Linshukin added a lot of OR stuff to the Gibbs Paradox article that had to be removed.  On her user page, Linshukin identifies herself as the director of MDPI which is a private research company that publishes online Open Access journals "to promote...the project."  It looks to me like Linkshukin was well-intentioned and the "Senses of Entropy" article and the journal are high quality, but maybe not objective and peer-reviewed enough for Wikepedia standards. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 10:23, 4 July 2010 (UTC)


 * I have cleaned up the article making use of some of the links given here. I will add more tomorrow after I check Atkins and other books. Now the nominator has effectively withdrawn his nomination by saying the article should be kept, could a non-involved admin please close this discussion as keep. -- Bduke   (Discussion)  08:48, 4 July 2010 (UTC)


 * In Entropy (energy dispersal). "Peter Atkins. . . . but then relapsed into confusing and problematic terminology" is NPOV. Atkins "Second Law" discusses both "energy tends to disperse" and "collapse into chaos".  This article is about a "new approach [which] avoids ambiguous terms such as disorder and chaos."  So I don't see how Atkins "Second Law" is part of the history of that new approach.  Atkins "Second Law", which does not avoid those terms, seems to be just part of the mainstream interpretation going back to Boltzmann.  I don't think the old mainstream approach denied energy dispersal, but it explained energy dispersal as a consequence of increasing disorder rather than as a primary cause. So the history of the new approach would be the history of criticisms of the disorder explanation, not the history of all discussions of energy dispersal as a type of increasing disorder. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 10:23, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * We are not discussing Entropy (energy dispersal). We are discussing Frank L. Lambert. If you want to discuss the former, please do so at Talk:Entropy (energy dispersal). This AfD should focus only on the latter. It is already over long. It would really help too, if you gave proper wiki links to the articles you are discussing. -- Bduke    (Discussion)  11:50, 4 July 2010 (UTC)

Repeating from first entry on this page: This article is linked to by 2 other articles which I believe should also be deleted:
 * See my original delete proposal at the top of this page. My understanding was that this was the way to propose the deletion of a group of related articles:

This article seems to be original research from Frank Lambert: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entropy_%28energy_dispersal%29

I suspect that this article has been heavily modified by Frank Lambert. See the talk page for some valid objections to the Lambert influence. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_entropy

As for this AfD being overly long, I think that is largely because some editors repeatedly posted meaningless comments claiming documentation without citing it. This whole AfD would have been unnecessary if the articles had included valid references to start with, instead on relying totally on a bunch of links to one personal web page. I see from the history of these articles that my objections to lack of valid references in these articles had been raised before and ignored. Thank you (and thanks to Radagast3) for finally adding valid references. The subject "Introduction to Entropy" is a very important one. I think it is worth taking the time to get it right. None of us wants to confuse beginning students. Ray Eston Smith Jr (talk) 17:16, 4 July 2010 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.