Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive May 2024

Glueballs
Can someone sufficiently knowledgeable update glueball to reflect the new experimental work in https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.132.181901. An article by Ethan Siegel reporting this is cited as the second reference, but the reference is only used in passing and the research and its significance is not discussed. Fences &amp;  Windows  08:58, 10 May 2024 (UTC)

Regarding a rejected draft article
Please see the discussion between @Jn.mdel and me on their draft Draft:Polarization_E_and_B_modes. I rejected the draft believing that it is better to put such information into Polarisation (waves), if not cosmic microwave background. I believe I have stated my case on my talk page. Any advice or comments are welcome. Cheers, -- The Lonely Pather (talk) 10:01, 8 May 2024 (UTC)


 * The prior discussion was long. I created a separate section with my two cents, for others to add to. Ldm1954 (talk) 12:32, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Sir I sincerely thank you for taking time to review and comment. I fully understand that a layman non-physicist like me cannot develop the article to exacting standards on day one - it would infact need lot more further inputs and value-adds of experts like yours and others. However I am encouraged that you agreed that even if the article is currently not notable - but the topic is. Infact that is why I was consistently not agreeable to repeated suggestions to merge this proposed article under "Polarisation (waves)" article and infact one of the revised title options suggested by you "E and B modes of Photon Polarisation" is quite close to what I had originally submitted "E and B mode Polarisation" - before it was changed by one of the wikipedia editors during draft sprucing. Hence, I would hope that now atleast the article can be retrieved - even if as a stub (as per https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:ATD) for further development. Jn.mdel (talk) 15:20, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Jn.mdel Your article has two references, one which would be adequate for a short section of Polarization (waves) and one which is better covered by Cosmic_microwave_background. These two articles already cross reference each other. The first step would be a section in Polarization (waves) and if that grew too be too long, we could split it out. But a separate article it not needed at this time. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:10, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Johnjbarton, can you please merge your comments into those on the talk page to avoid having duplication and misunderstanding. There is more to patterns of polarization than just CMB. Ldm1954 (talk) 16:47, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I think the discussion should be on Draft talk:Polarization E and B modes. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:02, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Sir with all due regards for your initiative to review and provide valuable comments, I would proceed with LDM suggestion to revert the project title to what it was originally proposed and then add further contents. My only humble point of difference being that adding this proposed content to two articles - "Polarisation (waves)" and "Cosmic Microwave Background" does not solve the issue because then I would need to go and add it into "Gravitational waves" also, into "Photon Polarisation" also, into some new article which talks possibly about "Other modes of Photon Polarisation" also - this way it is endless and that is why I have requested TLP (who has initially rejected the draft on certain assumptions that it is about waves polarisation or waveguide transverse modes etc, etc. - without querying or allowing even one opportunity to clarify) that compiling information in one place and linking from other articles where presently only the terms E and B modes occur is always better - because my article's focus was not all types of Photon Polarisation OR only CMB - instead it mention in its original submission comment that this article is relevant to BOTH cmb and gravitational waves study - and so I feel it needs to be separately developed. Jn.mdel (talk) 01:36, 9 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Please note that Draft:E and B Modes (Polarization) is not an acceptable title either, neither mode nor polarization is a proper noun and both should be lower case.so the article needs to be moved to conform with grammar and MoSanyway


 * I agree that it is unfortunate that @Jimfbleak thought that your title was a misspelling, so changed it -- you should have reverted his edit. By doing this he changed the apparent focus of the article leading to misunderstandings. However, IMO that does not mean it merits a stub as yet, it needs improvement first. Ldm1954 (talk) 16:57, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks sir - I would now proceed to revert the said edit and add further contents and images into the same article to justify. Jn.mdel (talk) 01:38, 9 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Jn.mdel Please note that Draft:E and B Modes (Polarization) is not an acceptable title either, neither mode nor polarization is a proper noun and both should be lower case.so the article needs to be moved to conform with grammar and MoS anyway Jimfbleak - talk to me? 15:39, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I don't think this matters. Please let Jn.mdel focus on drafting something new and more comprehensive Ldm1954 (talk) 20:14, 10 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Dear All (@Ldm1954@Johnjbarton@Jimfbleak@TheLonelyPather) I find it really strange how this draft new article got handled on wikipedia recently. I have nothing against Jim for having changed the title in good faith - but find it strange what the main "rejector" did - first, "rejected" the draft outright thinking it is about "Polarisation (waves)". Then after my repeated "Talk" messages, still the editor misunderstood the draft as being about Waveguide transverse modes OR CMB focussed (whereas the draft submission comments already stated "... relevant to CMB and gravitational waves study")- and even after experts confirmation that the draft is about "E and B modes Polarisation" pertaining to photons, the editor still stuck to an afterthought facesaver that please merge it with "Polarisation (waves)" - strange.
 * Even as of today on the disambiguation page "Polarisation" is described as " ... particularly about light waves..." - which has been my continued point that merging the new article would only confuse "Polarisation (waves)" article also - but still no amends by the "rejector".
 * Thanks to my wikipedia readings only, I came across this topic which is not explained at all on wikipedia currently - and so I tried to add an article to start explanations about something which only exists as english words in couple of articles on CMB and Gravitational waves - so instead of appreciating it and encouraging it and contributing to it - the editor response is misunderstanding and finally stonewalling it.
 * I would still only thank the "rejector" editor because those actions atleast made me interact with couple of experts (LDM, John) and understand how hardcore physicists review and interact patiently even with a layman like me.
 * BUT I had sincerely put in this initial content into this draft article which does not exist on wikipedia today - and to the best of my abilities too as I thought that others too would collaborate automatically in future on developing this further. Offcourse I do not know the presentation and how to add headings etc. skills or how to really use the wikipedia typing interface more efficiently but then I was thinking someone else would come along and help with the same automatically - because that is what wikipedia is all about.
 * But for that the article would have to be removed from "rejection" banner - otherwise no one else can contribute anything to the article. Jn.mdel (talk) 02:11, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I edited the disambiguation page for Polarization to remove the emphasis on light. I've made progress on Cosmic_microwave_background but still more can be done. As far as I know the only "b-mode" involved with gravitational waves comes from the work on cosmic microwave background work. Johnjbarton (talk) 20:01, 12 May 2024 (UTC)
 * @Johnjbarton@Ldm1954@TheLonelyPather Sir with sincere respect, you are now beginning to change goalposts - which is a little tricky path. As per this logic, then next we should delete existing separate articles on "Circular Polarisation", "Elliptical Polarisation" etc. etc. and merge all their content into "Polarisation (waves)" article only - because those terms are already mentioned in that supposedly over-arching article. Maybe also merge all waves- related articles including CMB, gravitational waves and all kinds of waves under ONLY "Waves" article - but surely we all agree that this does not help.
 * But thanks for acknowledging that B-mode observed in CMB researches is the evidence regarding gravitational waves - and probably if I am not mistaken the ONLY evidence currently - so I hope that admission itself is notable enough and making validity of this independent topic distinctly relevant. Thanks for taking interest to review and update CMB article for everyone's benefit. Jn.mdel (talk) 03:29, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * It is more important to be correct, on Wikipedia, than it is to be humble. Entire books have been written on polarization; its a vast topic, ranging from squeezed light to orbital angular momentum of light to the transverse E&B microwave cavity modes, to the Rayleigh sky model to optical polarization-based seismic and water wave sensing on transoceanic cables, and whatever else: the polarization of microwaves in the cosmic microwave background. And that's just ordinary light. Gravitation is something else again. You'll have trouble writing about general E&B modes, if you don't understand all these various specifics, and how they interplay with one-another. This is not a topic for the faint of heart. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:44, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I fully agree 100% that the only thing important amongst everything is to be correct to the best of you own knowledge / ability - especially for sake of others on wikipedia - otherwise one should probably only read and not try to contribute (but yes humbleness also is helpful).
 * Coming to your points about the extensive nature of this topic, I admit I do not have clue to many of the topic extensions mentioned in your note - as I never interact with this subject in the way you all do - mine is an organic reading-cum-learning journey and so I came across something for which I did not find any explanation on wikipedia till now - so did own groundwork and put it up so that the next one after me has some reference and/or starting explanation in simple layman language but with accurate references.
 * Hence, beyond the submitted initial draft, anything further I might be able to add would be completely dependent upon my own capacity to devote more time solely on this topic and read further (but nothing to do with faint-heartedness atleast because I am still aware of my article's initial focus)- but it would all be again as a layman only - so I guess only experts like you and also JOHN, LDM, even TLP may be better-qualified to contribute / develop this further. Jn.mdel (talk) 08:48, 13 May 2024 (UTC)

Biographical importance ratings?
The physics project template counts the number of articles ranked by importance, and quality. Here: WikiProject Physics/Quality Control There are currently 700+ articles with unassesed priority (marked "???"). Clicking through, almost all of these are biographies. I suspect that no one particularly wants to tackle this, because of the unpleasantness of tagging someone's biography as "unimportant". That, plus the true difficulty of actually assigning a relative ranking -- you have to be very cross-disciplinary to be able to assess such comparisons. And that's just within physics, never mind something like "my biologist is more important than your physicist" or god help us, "our TV anchor is more notable than your physicist". Thus, I'm wondering if perhaps there might be better to avoid this issue entirely? I'm thinking of allowing the template to have an "importance=biographical" value. Or maybe there is some better way to do this? FWIW, WikiProject Mathematics has exactly this same issue with unrated articles. (I'll cross-post there shortly.) 67.198.37.16 (talk) 00:10, 16 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Perhaps if you shared what purpose you have in mind for the importance maybe we can have an opinion. ??? seems like a fine category to me. You can probably search for importance ??? and bio=yes if you want. Johnjbarton (talk) 00:39, 16 May 2024 (UTC)


 * This is not up to me; this would have to be a community decision. About 700 physics articles would be affected. An equal number of math articles, or maybe more. I'm not sure, perhaps you are unfamiliar with the article ranking process? In that case, please take a look at WikiProject Physics/Quality Control and read what it says there. Study the table that appears at the top of that page, and you will see a column labelled "???" and a row labelled "unassessed". The unassesed row is easy to deal with, but the "???" column can only be emptied out by adding "importance=top/high/mid/low" to the article. A ranking of "importance=biography" would result in an error. Tagging with "bio=yes" would also result in a template error. This is because of some wikipedia-wide decision made about ten years ago, where a number of parameters were stripped from templates for many WP projects. So it can't "just be done", assorted people have to alter (1) the template (2) the bot that performs nightly summaries. A different alternative would be to just strip out WP physics from all these articles, and just dump the whole thing into the lap of WP biography, and let them deal with it. But I doubt that most of the rest of WPPhys would find that to be an appealing solution. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 03:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * If you do nothing, then 700 articles would not be affected. So my vote is do nothing. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:25, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Just noting the current count in . I think our table is a little out of date. Primefac (talk) 15:31, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I notified Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Biography and so maybe a subject-matter expert will provide clarity. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 03:57, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * This is the right place for your point, I do not think that a "subject-matter expert" in WT:BIO is the right approach -- members of this project should be doing this for everything except GA, FA, and A (of course). Perhaps it would be wise to suggest that only people with some established history (e.g. 3000+ edits or something else) do the rankings. Is there a physics "ranking team" as suggested at WP:ASSESS? Ldm1954 (talk) 04:18, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * No formal team. Few are interested in doing this, and approx zero who engage in biographies. Which is why I asked. 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:23, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * As someone who does a lot of assessments for WP:AST, I think it just comes down to "people not doing it" rather than any sort of unpleasantness surrounding the actual giving of the ranking. I'm basing this next statement on the AST importance scale since PHYS doesn't have one, but someone like Michael Abraham (rabbi) would be "low" because he has published physics articles but is not necessarily making significant contributions in the field. Primefac (talk) 11:22, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I was keeping up with the unranked articles for a while, and even got us down to inbox zero for a bit. Then someone tagged three hundred articles as "physics" in one go and I gave up.
 * The vast majority of physics bios ARE low importance, because being a fellow of the APS or equivalent is sufficient to establish notability, but there's a huge gap between "notable enough for a Wikipedia article" and "Mid-importance". PianoDan (talk) 14:33, 16 May 2024 (UTC)

Creating a page on ground-based GW detection
Hello everyone, as part of my ongoing work on bringing the Virgo interferometer to FA level (any review there is still helpful!), I have decided, in accordance to some comments I received, to create a new article dedicated to ground-based detection of gravitational waves using large interferometers. One of the motivation is that the Virgo interferometer article has become pretty heavy, and that a lot of its content overlaps with the LIGO and KAGRA articles (science case, general principle, data analysis). There is also a Gravitational-wave observatory article, but it encompasses other, very different detection methods such as resonant mass antennas or PTA.

I have already made a lot of progress on this article, which you can find in Draft:Ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave detection; a lot of content is taken over from Virgo interferometer (most of it was already written by me), which I plan to modify in order to link to the new article (in a WP:SPLIT fashion). I also plan to make similar changes to the other relevant articles.

As far as to the actual article I think it is currently good enough to put in the main namespace (although there is of course room for improvement, and any review/suggestion is welcome); there is an issue however, which is the name of the article. As you can see, the tentative name is quite long, and perhaps hard too read; what is your opinion of that ? For context:


 * "Ground-based" because we are specifically excluding space-based projects such as LISA, which use pretty different techniques and probe different sources
 * "Interferometric" because we talk about interferometer detectors, and exclude resonant mass antenna or PTA
 * "gravitational-wave detection" because this is what we are talking about
 * The article encompasses mostly the LIGO, Virgo and KAGRA detectors, but also smaller detectors such as GEO 600 to a lesser degree.

Any ideas on how to shorten that ? Thuiop (talk) 15:55, 7 May 2024 (UTC)


 * Drop "Ground-based" and include a summary paragraph on LISA outlining the differences. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:09, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Issue is, the differences are massive. Only the very core idea of using interferometry is the same, but the mechanics behind it are very different (LISA has no mirrors for instance, the interferometry is done using complex numerical techniques) and the type of sources it can observe is also very different (with only a bit of overlap), meaning that analysis techniques are also different. It makes more sense to have the differences between the two outlined in Gravitational-wave observatory, which is a broader article which does not go in-depth about the different techniques. There could probably be a "Space-based ..." article, but LISA being the only really relevant project for now it is probably better to have everything about space-based GW detection in the LISA article. Thuiop (talk) 16:54, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Combine this paragraph with the sentence you used above and use that as the summary paragraph. I think a direct discussion of LISA belong in your article in any case. The section Gravitational-wave observatory has less information than you have already posted here.
 * The 'ground' is least important aspect of the topic. If you want advice to cut it down, cut there. Johnjbarton (talk) 17:51, 7 May 2024 (UTC)
 * If more information should be added, it should be in Gravitational-wave observatory (which I may do at some point). I reiterate : space-based and ground-based observatories have very little in common apart from the fact that they both use interferometry. The article is already 87000 bytes large, and adding the relevant information on space-based observatories could easily double the size of the article, as well as diluting the message. I don't think there really is a point in expending the scope of the article here; my concern is how to make that scope clear without being too verbose. I will keep thinking about it but will go with the current title if I do not find a solution. Thuiop (talk) 13:04, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Agreed, space-based and ground-based have little in common, and don't belong mixed together in the same article, However, merging common content from Virgo, Kagra, current generation LIGO and next 1-2 versions of LIGO, and then the 2 or 4 additional future proposals (India...) would be excellent. I've found myself toggling over the various articles, with my eyes glazing over when there's repeated content, and then working hard to figure out what's new/different/changed. A one-stop-shop overview of ground systems w/short summaries of how they differ would be great. Thank you! 67.198.37.16 (talk) 06:17, 13 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Well, it is done. I took the name Ground-based interferometric gravitational-wave search in the end, for lack of a better one. Thuiop (talk) 20:53, 16 May 2024 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the initiative. I think the article is both useful and is already in a pretty good state. I don't have a useful suggestion for shortening the title, though. I don't think it's inordinate long. Tercer (talk) 20:32, 7 May 2024 (UTC)

Proposal to merge stationary action principle into action principles
Please weigh in on Talk:Action_principles.

Note that this merge is related to older discussions principle of least action. The effect of the merge would be to change that redirect to point to action principles. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:50, 22 May 2024 (UTC)

Sun FAR
I have nominated Sun 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. 750h+ 01:22, 24 May 2024 (UTC)