Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive May 2022

FAR for Supernova
I have nominated Supernova for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Delist" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. BloatedBun (talk) 10:59, 5 May 2022 (UTC)

Materials physics
I've been going through articles in Category:Condensed matter physics, and came across the article materials physics, which based on overlap in subject matter, I am proposing be merged into materials science. Appreciate any thoughts you all might have in the discussion. &#12296; Forbes72 &#124; Talk &#12297; 03:16, 9 May 2022 (UTC)

Chézy formula article update
Hello Physics WikiProject! I have just completed a major contribution to the Chézy formula page as part of a WikiEdu course. It's an article that was flagged as needing help to improve it from a stub by this WikiProject, so I wanted to update y'all on the progress made. I think it is much improved and the quality scale could be reassessed. I'm still very new to Wikipedia editing, but please feel free to edit or change anything you'd like there. Thanks! Katiejill127 (talk) 20:40, 10 May 2022 (UTC)

Tandem Van de Graaff


This article is in a woefully incomplete state — it has no information about the technical details of this type of accelerator; some sections are empty or just random blurbs; was placed in a single, incorrect category; and has not changed much since 2010. –LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄ ) 05:12, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Content about individual accerators was added on August 2021 by =. There are 7 incoming links from mainspace:
 * Brookhaven National Laboratory
 * Van de Graaf
 * Alternating Gradient Synchrotron
 * Electrostatic particle accelerator
 * Mexico and weapons of mass destruction
 * Index of physics articles (T)
 * Yale Wright Laboratory
 * –LaundryPizza03 ( d c̄ ) 05:18, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * This is right in my wheelhouse. I'm busy this weekend, but I'll see what I can do when I get back. PianoDan (talk) 14:52, 6 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Erf - this is going to take some thought. Right now we have several different articles, Electrostatic particle accelerator, Van de Graff generator, Tandem Van de Graaff, and Pelletron with a lot of overlap and redundancy.  I'm thinking that the right thing to do is probably to shorten Electrostatic Particle accelerator a bit, moving most of the information on Van de Graff generators into that article, with a reasonably sized summary in the top level article.  Ditto for pelletrons. Tandem van de Graff's don't really warrant their own article, and would be fine merged to the main Van de Graff article.  Does this seem a reasonable plan? PianoDan (talk) 22:58, 9 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Sounds reasonable to me. I doubt there was a plan for how to distribute the material in the first place. XOR&#39;easter (talk) 00:22, 10 May 2022 (UTC)
 * This is taking a minute, for sure. I've rewritten a big chunk of the Van de Graaff generator article, and blanked and redirected Tandem Van de Graaff there.  I don't think the blow-by-blow listing of every model MP tandem was important enough to keep.  Next I need to figure out whether I want to tackle the article at "Electrostatic Particle accelerator" or the awful article at "pelletron" first. Both are in dire need of work. PianoDan (talk) 20:43, 11 May 2022 (UTC)

Artificial gravity
At Artificial gravity, I recently cleaned up some OR in two of the subsections:
 * In "Human spaceflight", I removed about 3 paragraphs of OR that primarily sought to develop engineering proposals without any references and raise.
 * The subsubsubsection "Gemini missions" was absorbed into the upper level after removing an OR statement about the Gemini 8 malfunction. I would suggest making a new "Experimental systems" section to cover the Gemini 11 experiment and any other real-world attempts to implement a rotating space station system.
 * The subsection "Mechanism" was renamed to "Differences from normal gravity" and rewritten to eliminate OR, including unsourced material about engineering issues that would nevertheless require a separate subsection. Some references were added about the and the effects on the vestibular system.
 * The subsection "Centrifuges" was removed because it was unsourced and off-topic.

I'm not sure yet what to do with the following formula table, which was accompanied by a graph that is still in the article. I don't think we will need any versions of this formula other than the acceleration formula.

As for the long-disputed "Simulating microgravity" section, I would suggest removing it and migrating it to the page Micro-g environment, which does not adequately cover simulated microgravity. I would also suggest removing the "Simulating lunar gravity" section, since it is also off-topic and already included at Gravitation of the Moon. I am not certain on what to do with the rest of the content, apart from removing excess images. –LaundryPizza<b style="color:#b00">03</b> ( d c̄ ) 02:12, 12 May 2022 (UTC)

""
currently redirects to laser ablation. It occurs to me, this shouldn't be the case. There are many types of light ablation unrelated to lasers, such as the creation of the coma of comets, the process of photoetching. I acknowledge that the old underlying article at "photoablation" was just a laser ablation article, but the term itself isn't so restrictive. -- 65.92.247.17 (talk) 14:00, 19 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Are there enough existing targets on Wikipedia to make it a disambiguation page? PianoDan (talk) 15:59, 19 May 2022 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure about the non-astronomical topics.
 * It would depend on how to treat the astrophysical topics; (probably better as a set index?) aside from cometary comas and other outgassing, there's the pulsars that blast away their companions with their powerful X-ray beams, Chthonian planets that are being evaporated away because they orbit too close and are solar radiation heated to the point of boiling away. Mars's carbon dioxide polar caps also experience solar sublimation, as does the entire frozen atmosphere global snowcap of Pluto as it approaches aphelion turning back into a gaseous atmosphere -- 65.92.247.17 (talk) 02:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)
 * It would depend on how to treat the astrophysical topics; (probably better as a set index?) aside from cometary comas and other outgassing, there's the pulsars that blast away their companions with their powerful X-ray beams, Chthonian planets that are being evaporated away because they orbit too close and are solar radiation heated to the point of boiling away. Mars's carbon dioxide polar caps also experience solar sublimation, as does the entire frozen atmosphere global snowcap of Pluto as it approaches aphelion turning back into a gaseous atmosphere -- 65.92.247.17 (talk) 02:33, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Canonical Theory
I ran across this today, and... I'm somewhat baffled. The page on canonical theory has three citations, two of which are broken. When I attempt to do further research, I've determined that:
 * Joel E. Keizer is probably notable enough for a Wikipedia page on his own merits.
 * His book on non-equilibrium statistical dynamics has hundreds of citations.
 * "Canonical theory", on the other hand, is a much less common search match, and turns up on fringy, non-notable sites.

The page either needs to be PRODed or cleaned up, but I'll be damned if I can tell which, or how to go about DOING the cleanup if that's what it needs. PianoDan (talk) 18:16, 20 May 2022 (UTC)


 * Well Shalizi's page is archived but is just a reference to two Phys Rev articles which I didn't read but neither explicitly mentions "canonical theory" in the abstract. Shalizi's blockquote in the article is unsourced, but I found it (and it links to his bio (archived) and references his final book). Oprisan's paper seems to be very limited in both scope and impact – there's nothing to suggest it's a significant enough extension of the theory to be worth noting. Based on what's there I agree there's a far better to case to be made for an article about Keizer himself, which would note canonical theory within.
 * You can start by moving the article to Keizer and having canonical theory redirect there. Then to the Keizer article you'll want to add his bibliography and positions, and of course the dates of birth and death. SamuelRiv (talk) 18:46, 20 May 2022 (UTC)

Ben Roy Mottelson
Hello, physicists. Ben Roy Mottelson has died and his wikibio has been nominated to appear in the Recent Deaths section on MainPage. Just wondering if anyone here would be interested in beefing this article up before the link gets posted there, hopefully within the next couple of days. Thanks. --PFHLai (talk) 13:37, 21 May 2022 (UTC)

Major addition
Could someone from this project, have a look at the major additions that were added to Kinetics (physics) please. As well as the horrible formatting, I think the content may be a copy and paste job. Thanks - X201 (talk) 13:16, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Thanks for highlighting this. There was no obvious copyvio (some sites came up but they may be mirrors) or copy-paste job I could find, though the formatting would need considerable improvement. Moreover, as stated, the term kinetics has been largely superseded by dynamics and there are already fairly accessible definitions of the physical terms on WP. A few of these definitions also fell more within the scope of kinematics, so would in any case be explained better elsewhere. ComplexRational (talk) 13:28, 25 May 2022 (UTC)

Quintessence (physics)
A user recently added information at the article Quintessence (physics) regarding a 2022 paper which claims that a particular quintessence model predicts that "the universe may start to end within the cosmic near-future of the next 100 million years, during which accelerating expansion of the Universe would reverse to contraction." The same statement was previously added at 2022 in science. I've seen mentions of quintessence models where dark energy density can become negative, as happens in this particular model, but I'd like an expert opinion on whether this finding is likely to be due weight at these articles, and if the additions are neutral.

The paper in question is available open-access from PNAS and as an arXiv preprint; I get the impression that while the article and the associated media coverage are a fair presentation of the paper, the paper's results are unnecessarily overstated through a specific choice of parameters. The authors should have worked out all parameters which are in agreement with observation, rather than choosing just one; they mention at the end that a conjectured upper bound on the end of cosmic expansion in their model is 2.4 trillion years from now, in constrast to the "low" estimate of about 50 million years. –<b style="color:#77b">Laundry</b><b style="color:#fb0">Pizza</b><b style="color:#b00">03</b> ( d c̄ ) 05:00, 25 May 2022 (UTC)
 * We ought not to be making bold claims in articles based on primary sources. If there isn't yet a reliable secondary source for this idea, it's probably too soon to cover it.--Srleffler (talk) 20:59, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Should I also delete the claim at 2022 in science? –<b style="color:#77b">Laundry</b><b style="color:#fb0">Pizza</b><b style="color:#b00">03</b> ( d c̄ ) 22:50, 28 May 2022 (UTC)
 * Perhaps not. I see that the text there doesn't cite just the original paper, but also two secondary sources. That addresses my complaint. The existence of such coverage is important, because it indicates there is wider interest in the paper's idea. A primary source on its own can't tell you that anyone takes the idea seriously other than the authors.--Srleffler (talk) 16:33, 30 May 2022 (UTC)

Merger discussion for Hot dry rock geothermal energy
An article that you have been involved in editing&mdash;Hot dry rock geothermal energy&mdash;has been proposed for merging with another article. If you are interested, please participate in the merger discussion. Thank you. Chidgk1 (talk) 18:06, 30 May 2022 (UTC)