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Cosmology

Are you interested in forming a WikiProject ando/or WikiPortal cosmology? See also [1], [2]. --Pjacobi 18:15, 2005 Mar 5 (UTC)

I'm not very interested in helping to administer such a WikiProject or WikiPortal, but I'd probably make use of the WikiProject. I'm not sure a portal is justified, as the Astronomy WikiPortal seems a more appropriate place for cosmology-related articles to be presented. --Christopher Thomas 22:05, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Harmonics Theory

Thread from 18 May 2005

I'm utterly baffled as to why this article hasn't been VfD'ed as original research. Where are you hoping to go with it? Gazpacho 03:30, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Much as with Autodynamics, any overt attempt to remove it or drastically chop it down will only result in its adherents re-posting it and insinuating it into other articles. What I'm trying to accomplish is what finally (mostly) happened with Autodynamics - the article is reduced to a relatively short NPOV description that the proponents feel fairly accurately describes their pet theory, but that gives most other readers the (correct) impression that this is not something to be taken seriously by anyone interested in mainstream science. I expect this to happen within a couple of weeks; the main problem right now is that I haven't wrapped my mind around Mr. Tomes' beliefs regarding its underpinnings enough to write a summary article he wouldn't revert. By all means put the article on VfD; I just doubt it will pass (Mr. Tomes has dug up enough google links to make a case for it being Notable, and the article will eventually be chopped down to a summary form that contains little original work - just pointers to his off-site ramblings). I hope this clarifies my intentions. --Christopher Thomas 05:05, 18 May 2005 (UTC)
(deleted comment)
The current form of the article is certainly unacceptable, as it is a long, original essay. Something closer to the form of the Autodynamics article would seem to be encyclopedic enough to be acceptable. Like I said, by all means suggest a VfD. I doubt it will be a permanent solution, but at the very least, you can probably force it to be chopped down (and the wildly proliferating "HT applied to X" articles to be removed). Alternatively, I can try to replace them with a single, short, encyclopedic article before the dust settles in the talk page; however, I think that's likely to just be reverted at this point. I'll give it a try anyways. --Christopher Thomas 05:54, 18 May 2005 (UTC)

Thread from 1 June 2005

Replied to your post on my talk page. I don't know what you mean when you say "the statements are inconsistent". I read the article, I read the VfD discussion. I'm sorry my statements are puzzling. I tried to state the obvious as honestly and simply as I could. linas 23:20, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Discussion continued on your talk page. --Christopher Thomas 23:33, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thread from 3 June 2005

Hi Christopher. I'm just following up on your invitation on VfD to ask about references to criticisms of Harmonics Theory. Your rewritten sandbox article contains only 3 references. The "Remarks on the KARMEN anomaly" paper is really only tangentially related as it doesn't mention harmonics theory at all. It's important to Tomes, but I don't think anyone can reproduce his work that claims to predict a particle that isn't yet confirmed. The other two references are for HT advocacy. There are no references to HT criticism at all. What are your specific references for these two claims in your HT rewrite:

  • The resulting spectral power distribution is not consistent with the power distribution derived from applying conventional materials science to the scenarios in question.
  • Claims of predictions of observed events by harmonics theory are not accepted by most mainstream scientists.
(I think a stronger statement is accurate: I doubt HT is accepted by any mainstream scientists at all, but it needs a cite to avoid being original research.)

Thanks. Quale 15:39, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Sorry for the delay. I'd taken a short sabbatical from Wikipedia to focus on work (and to enjoy the weekend). Addressing comments as follows:
  • Links at the bottom are mostly provided for context:
  • The first HT link goes to a page where Mr. Tomes expresses his own views on HT. This would be difficult to remove while remaining neutral.
  • The "cycles institute" link goes to the organization that if I understand correctly is the group that he's publically presented his works at. It would be similarly difficult to claim NPOV while removing that. This is a vastly pared-down version of the pro-HT list that Mr. Tomes had available.
  • The KARMEN paper is linked because it's cited by both "pro" and "con" sides in the article text.
I agree that links to works deconstructing HT would be useful. I don't have any handy, beyond newsgroup archives (which aren't peer-reviewed publications). The lack of such links is good circumstantial evidence for declaring HT to be non-notable.
  • Re. power spectra, I suppose I can pick a random materials science textbook, though I expect it to be moot when the VfD passes. Cavity resonator gives a brief overview of how a continuously-driven system will react to stimulus. Resonance gives a more general description. The Resonance page links to a very nice online tutorial on resonance in general (http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/rescon.html), which I've added to the current version of harmonics theory.
  • Re. claims of prediction not being accepted, I'm not sure what would constitute a useful citation. If HT had published peer-reviewed papers, a rebuttal might appear in the literature, but all you'd likely be able to find as-is is a _lack_ of citations for HT work, which I doubt would be citable itself. I suppose I could track through newsgroup archives and see if any of the people arguing with Mr. Tomes were reputable physicists, but I don't see how this could be directly cited either. I'm open to suggestion on types of links that would be appropriate.
--Christopher Thomas 23:48, 6 Jun 2005 (UTC)
Update - I've added subheadings in harmonics theory to clarify which links are mainstream-accepted content and which aren't. --Christopher Thomas 00:09, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Thread from 6 June 2005

I just wanted to say "thanks" for all the effort you've put into the thankless (and apparently endless) effort to salvage something presentable from the outpourings of Ray Tomes' brain. As time goes by, however, it seems that Tomes' behavior is becoming increasingly non-collegial (e.g., broadcast insults, sock-puppet voting) such that I'm getting to the point where I'd rather see the thing get VfD'd for good, rather than have Tomes et al. be able to sneak their stuff back in via misdirection (..."but sandbox2 is clearly better than the current article!") or simply wearing down all opposition. --Dcfleck 00:11, 2005 Jun 7 (UTC)

Glad to help. It'll be a relief when it gets deleted; my main concern is that Mr. Tomes will continue to put POV HT-related material into many other pages on Wikipedia (he has a list of pages he's modified on his web site, though digging up the link to it is proving difficult). Cycle studies is a big one he's had a hand in. Short of banning him, there's no real way to prevent him from doing this. As for his comments, I found his assertation that his english is better than mine to be very amusing. --Christopher Thomas 00:24, 7 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Swiss Roll (Metamaterial)

Hi

well I've made a start on swiss roll (metamaterial). I must have created the link but not created the page (so it naturally wasn't on my watchlist). Thinking about it, this is a likely loophole for all sorts of vandalism and unwiki type behaviour (Oh, and I'm definitely not an expert...I probably made the edits you picked up on when I was wikifying a Nature paper that caught my eye one Thursday lunchtime!)

very best wishes and keep up the good pseudoscience NPOVing

Robinh 21:20, 24 May 2005 (UTC)

All the links I removed where dead. User:Oleg Alexandrov has a bot that scanned for them and I do the manual confirmation. The dead link list is at User:Mathbot/Bad_links and a discussion I had with Oleg at User talk:Oleg Alexandrov#Dead links. As you see the list is quite large so I'm trying to save some time by not adding any comments.

(Anti-grav isn't in the bots domain (Category:Mathematics) but I stumbled on the article when checking a possible crank page, both had a dead link to this domain.)

--R.Koot 16:44, 30 May 2005 (UTC)

They aren't dead. I checked. Please do so yourself before removing them; bots aren't infallible. --Christopher Thomas 18:31, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I did, else the bot could have removed them. Could you point out any links which are not dead but which I did remove? --R.Koot 18:41, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
Checked it, checked it again and again to be sure. It is dead, nor has a fresh copy of it appears on archive.org for a while.
Check your ISP's firewalling, then - it works fine both from home and from work for me. --Christopher Thomas 02:03, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

http://www.ai.mit.edu/~jpg/dabble/ , does appear to be broken).

The first was dead, the second seemed to be vanity IMHO. (You can't possibly list every freeware version of this game some-one ever wrote in Visual Basic).
The second would be vanity if it was added by its creator - this does not seem to be the case. Listing every freeware version would indeed be superfluous, but there is presently one (1) downloadable version listed - the one you'd removed. Removing it was IMO out of line. --Christopher Thomas 02:03, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
If you find a broken link, the first thing to check is whether or not it's been moved somewhere. Find the missing page in Google, and then google for distinctive terms. If it's been moved, replace the broken link with the correct link. If you find a link that _is_ dead, not moved, at minimum put "removed broken link" in the "edit summary" box when removing it. A common mode of Wikipedia vandalism _is_ arbitrary removal of links, so it's important to make it very clear that that's _not_ what you're doing. --Christopher Thomas 21:02, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
I fixed at some of them, but a lot of them are user pages on .edu sites which no longer exist. I will comment them out in stead of removing them and add a comment. --R.Koot 21:46, 30 May 2005 (UTC)
By far the most important thing to do is to _fill in_ the "edit summary" box, so that others know what you're doing. As for commenting out links, instead just move the broken link to the talk page for the article, removing it from the main article, if you don't feel like searching for wherever the page in question moved to. However, behavior re. the anti-gravity link suggests that your ISP is doing something strange for at least some sites. --Christopher Thomas 02:03, 31 May 2005 (UTC)
Agree with the edit summary thing. Oleg Alexandrov 05:23, 31 May 2005 (UTC)

saving my breath

You're probably right about saving my breath with people like that (whatever his number was). It's just annoying when ignorant people aren't willing to listen to other people's advice. Anyway, back to more editting ... --- Mpatel 07:12, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)

Believe me, I agree. I've had to deal with something similar with harmonics theory for the past couple of weeks. The good news is, 81.218.238.113 is a cut and dried enough blocking case that he'll vanish as soon as the vandalism backlog is cleared. --Christopher Thomas 16:16, 12 Jun 2005 (UTC)


Non-scientist looking for help!

Please could you have a quick look at http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/articles/time.pdf I am, if anything, a philosopher and Penrose is about the limit (and beyond) my understanding. But I am concerned with well-anchored cross-disciplinary work. I hope this is not too far from your interests/knowledge. If so - could you 'refer on'? Also, and secondarily, there seems a Wikipedia convention of categorising problematic, challenging and difficult material as 'psuedoscience'which seems to be POV and I am beginning to wonder whether there needs much greater definition about this. Any thoughts? Thanks for any help. I am new to WIKI - is there a convention as to whether you reply on your page or on mine? Jeffrey Newman 08:42, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

It's less confusing if the thread stays on one page, though I've seen it go either way. As for pseudoscience, the main problem is that most of the pseudoscience pages on Wikipedia claim to be unquestionable scientific fact. This isn't correct - the majority of scientists, who are presumably smart enough to judge such things, think the claims made (for most of these pages) are false. NPOV in this context, to the best of my understanding, requires that any pseudoscience article make clear 1) that its contents aren't widely accepted as fact and 2) what the differences between it and mainstream science are. There are also other concerns - mostly with many of the pages being original research - but you'd asked about POV specifically. --Christopher Thomas 15:57, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
My first impression of the article is that it strings together a number of interesting-sounding scientific ideas from other sources, and then walks straight off the deep end with them. However, it's 107 pages, and I'm afraid I'm not about to spend the several days required to pick it apart line by line. A handful of objections off the top of my head are below:
  • Consciousness is sufficiently ill-defined in general that pointing out a mechanism for it will be next to impossible. To show that a given mechanism is likely, you have to show how it produces the effects associated with consciousness while other mechanisms don't, and you can't do that without a rigid definition of consciousness and a mechanistic way of evaluating how conscious a given system is.
  • The article seems to assume that something special is required for consciousness that can't be explained by our conventional understanding of the brain as a classical information processing device, and making that _assumption_, starts postulating wildly about mechanisms. This is the reverse of what a scientific approach should be.
  • The article point-blank accepts as fact several things that are very far from being shown as fact (psychokinesis, remote viewing), and then postulates wildly about mechanisms (again the opposite of what a scientific approach would be).
  • Obligatory "Tesla was a master of space and time" chapter, complete with poor understanding of physics in general (the "arrow of time" is a perception based on entropy - we see time flowing in whatever direction entropy increases, due to our nature as information-processing entities).
However, like I said, I haven't picked it apart line by line. User:Salsb might be a better person to ask, as he's a physics prof, while my field is engineering.
Lastly, if you want a general guideline for evaluating fringe ideas, remember that if mainstream science objects to something, it may not always be right, but it almost certainly is objecting for good reasons. --Christopher Thomas 16:07, 12 July 2005 (UTC)
Pitkänens article was deleted after this VfD: Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Topological Geometrodynamics. Most likely the not very well hidden attempts to manipulate the vote was a major cause of the final admin decision. --Pjacobi 16:30, July 12, 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for your response - and to User:Pjacobi also. Given what you have written, I will take this no further at present. The issues on mainstream science, proto and pseudo do concern me but I shall not rush! Jeffrey Newman 17:28, 12 July 2005 (UTC)



I accidentally ended up this page and was more than amazed by the very peculiar comments about my work made by Christopher Thomas.

a) No mechanism of consciousness is proposed. The very notion is nonsensical in the conceptual framework considered. The problem of consciousness is much much more deeper than inventing some mechanism. A deep generalization of quantum measurement theory as well as quantum theory itself together with a new ontology is needed before one can have even definition of consciousness. The theory relies on a unification of fundamental forces leading to a rich spectrum of predictions besides explaining the known basic facts. Mechanisms are proposed for various biological and brain functions such as long term memory: these mechanisms are inspired by the new view about time, space-time, and quantum. It seems that the attribute "wild" projects to the external world the deep ignorance of the person who wrote the comments above.

b) It is amusing to find that there still exist people who think seriously that classical mechanics might be enough to explain consciousness and regard as unscientific approaches based on the physics born in nineteenth century. Where do all these people come from?

c) There exists no chapter "Tesla was a master of space-time" which suggests that the person who wrote the comments has never visited my homepage. I hope that this person does not act as administrator.

d) The article does NOT state that psychokinesis and remote viewing are empirical facts but leaves their ontological status open. Only TGD based mechanisms giving rise to this kind of phenomena are considered. The same mechanisms apply to ordinary sensory perception but in shorter time and length scales. No one in his right mind would claim that elementary particle theories or cosmology are pseudoscience although most or this work relates to phenomena which are not yet shown to exist.


e) Concerning the deletion of the article. I wrote it using the stub created by a person who had written an article about theories of consciousness. For the simple reason that I am the only person able to do this. This created a storm and some wandal (one of the respected administrators?) even destroyed the original links! The claim about manipulation of the vote is an unashamed lie and demonstrates how miserable the moral level of some people involved is.

f) What strengthens the impression that something stinks very badly is that my work was labelled as pseudoscience by criticists although <A HREF="http://www.ams.org/mathweb/mi-mathbyclass.html">Mathematical Subject Classification Table of American Mathematical Society</A> has a link to my homepage. This together with above comments should really give to anyone with brains something to ponder about.

Matti Pitkanen

The contents of this response pretty much illustrate my objections to the originally cited article. Mr. Pitkanen makes a number of claims in this response about what is "required" in order to understand consciousness, without either defining what he's calling "consciousness" or providing supporting evidence for his claims. Similarly, to dismiss as impossible an explanation based on classical mechanics or any other explanation, you not only have to define what you're talking about (in other words, define what you mean by "consciousness"), but rigorously show that any form of the mechanism being dismissed leads to behavior that is inconsistent with observations. This is the foundation of the scientific method, and lack of such rigor is what separates pseudoscience from science.
As for the claims themselves, a better place to discuss them would be at Talk:Consciousness. Have fun. --Christopher Thomas 19:13, 5 December 2005 (UTC)

Green Cheese

Hi Christopher, I have translated your nice page into german [3]. Regards, MBq --217.237.186.245 14:36, 13 July 2005 (UTC)

Thanks. --Christopher Thomas 15:14, 13 July 2005 (UTC)


laser cooling

Hi Christopher. Page Talk:Solar sail claims you know something about laser cooling.

I thought the laser cooling article sounded more complicated than necessary. "an ensemble of atoms" -- is such technical terminology really necessary? (I don't mind technical terminology, when it can be used to create a brief, succinct definition. But when it's not significantly shorter than plain talk, why bother?) (Is it obvious I'm not a physicist?)

I hacked out a rough draft of a simpler-to-understand version at Talk:Laser_cooling . Would you mind reading it and either moving it to the corresponding article, or pointing out thing that must be fixed before moving it?

Surprisingly often, I think something is simple, yet when I try to explain it to someone else, my explanation gets longer and longer and I start to realize I don't really understand it as well as I thought I did.

Today, I realized that I don't really know if a single atom's transistion frequency is really only one precise and exact fixed frequency (merely appearing as a wider band because of the doppler effects of the atoms-to-be-cooled at nonzero temperatures, and the doppler effects of the atoms in the equipment used to produce the laser beam), or if it's a band of frequencies. (Don't metals and other large molecules interact with photons over a wide bands of frequencies? Or is just a large number of very closely-spaced exact frequencies?)

--DavidCary 04:00, 29 July 2005 (UTC)

I'm afraid I'm on WikiSabbatical at the moment, but I'm certainly willing to take a look at it when I get back. To address your questions here, the short answer is that the transition lines are indeed fuzzy, but I can't tell you why off the top of my head. For transition metal elements, it's a bit of both happening (you have bands composed of many transition lines, but you also have fuzziness in the lines themselves). Perhaps some of the editors of laser cooling and spectroscopy articles could give you more information. --Christopher Thomas 01:33, 9 August 2005 (UTC)
Update - Remembered why the lines are fuzzy. The idea is that you know the electrons are (mostly) confined to their orbitals, which means you know their position with a specific degree of accuracy. This means you have a specific amount of uncertainty in your knowledge of their momentum (due to Heisenberg's uncertainty principle), meaning that the energy level corresponding to any given state is fuzzy. This makes the transition frequencies fuzzy. Calculating exactly how fuzzy they are requires a lot of integration for "hydrogen-like" systems (one electron in a high-energy state above a spherically symmetric core), and is difficult enough to have to be solved numerically for more complex systems (where multiple electrons interact with each other, making potential energy calculations difficult). --Christopher Thomas 17:46, 14 August 2005 (UTC)
If you have no objections, I'd like to move this entire ==laser cooling== section from your talk page over to the "laser cooling" page, in preparation for moving the good bits into the actual article. --DavidCary 19:45, 30 November 2005 (UTC)
I'd prefer that you copy it, as opposed to move it (i.e., leave this version intact for my own records). Beyond that, go ahead. You'll also want to hunt down a physicist who can do the actual linewidth calculations for you, as they'll be able to provide much more useful editing advice for the article than I can. --Christopher Thomas 08:01, 7 December 2005 (UTC)

disputed negative energy redirect to exotic matter

Hi Christopher, You re-redirected the gibberish-laden negative energy article to the exotic matter article, but i'm not sure it belongs there as there is currently no information about any negative energy there. Please see the exotic matter talk page for more Intangir 07:04, 28 August 2005 (UTC)

My rationale was covered in the relevant discussion threads on Wikipedia:Pages needing attention/Physics, now archived at Wikipedia talk:Pages needing attention/Physics. Capsule summary is that this is the best redirect of the available options that I could see.--Christopher Thomas 19:37, 1 September 2005 (UTC)

Thanks for reading and commenting

Hi, Chris. On Energy, was an article I wrote some time ago and published elsewhere, I copied it into my user page more to see what topics turned up red (so I could write the entries) than anything else. I thank you for your thoughtful observations.

The main thrust of the article, in the context in which it was written, was to attack the fear-mongering of energy shortages on one hand and shine a harsh light on the pie-in-the-sky biofuel/wind/sunlight "solutions" that were being touted as fixes. The thrust of my argument was (and remains) that there are only two energy technologies that can scale fast enough to deal with the worlds appetite for power: coal and nuclear. And that the two reasons for this are; they are mature systems withs enough of their particular fuels available to grow their output significantly; they fit within the existing energy distribution infrastructure. All the other alternatives fail one of those two tests and ultimately because of that they cannot contribute significantly to the supply.

I will take umbrage with this statment of yours however:

The "denatured" plutonium can still have its weapons-suitable isotopes extracted. India did that after buying CANDU reactors from us, if memory serves. I was amused when Chretien claimed there was no way our reactors could be used for weapons programs when talking about selling them to China. He almost certainly knew this wasn't strictly true (just more difficult). Such is politics.

CANDUs were not used by India for Pu production. The reactor was CIRUS a pool reator based on the NRX design. This is a Canadian design- true- but it was fuelled with US enriched uranium, originaly Canada had fueled it with natural uraniun which would not have produced Pu in large enough amounts. Yes a CANDU can breed Pu, but China and everyone else that makes weapons grade fissionable material uses dedicated breeders. The issue is a bit of a red herring. The two links will give you the full story.

Thanks again for taking the time to comment DV8 2XL 06:01, 15 November 2005 (UTC)

Request for Arbitration (A bomb)

I agree, this has to be put to a rest. DV8 2XL 04:16, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Chris, I pulled out your link to talk the RfC over at A-bomb the discussion should happen in one forum IMHO. DV8 2XL 21:21, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Please note your change on Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Maths, science, and technology, then, as the relevant entry points to both pages (as did the entry on Talk:Nuclear weapon). --Christopher Thomas 21:28, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Done DV8 2XL 21:32, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
(Checking edits) ...I meant by adding a note under my comment saying "please keep all discussion at (foo)". I'd prefer that my own comments not be modified, per usual ettiquette, as it causes confusion over what exactly was said. I agree that centralizing is probably a good idea. --Christopher Thomas 21:39, 16 November 2005 (UTC)
Sorry, I did take a liberty there that I shouldn't have. No pie for me tonight. DV8 2XL 22:04, 16 November 2005 (UTC)

Nuclear weapon design

A 10 kiloton explosion really does have a 1,000,000 m/sec debris velocity.

Your refusal to recognize this fact testifys of your ignorance about nuclear physics.*That is also why your nuclear weapons articles are unsatisfactory also. They contaim multiple physics errors which I tried to correct by editing them. Then I tried to address your physics errors in my A-bomb article which you have repeatedly vandalized becuase you are a megalomanic young kid with an unreasonable attitude. Tmayes1999

You keep making statements like this, but you keep neglecting to link to decent citations. Cite your sources, and make them good ones, and you'll find people may accept your data more. In particular, you may also find that the actual numbers differ from what you'd thought. 200 km/sec is the upper bound to fission plasma velocity if neutrons are produced (and they are, big time). If you have enough matter around the bomb to thermalize them and redistribute their energy, you have enough inert matter to drop the temperature and slow the shockwave by a comparable amount. I'd show you the calculations if I'd thought it would do any good, but you seem to have already decided what to believe regardless of what is actually the case. --Christopher Thomas 16:37, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

Off-topic?

Could you please explain how is the allegations of systemic bias in the scientific community off-topic in scientific articles? Sincerley, JDR

I have already responded to this at Talk:Big Bang. Capsule summary is that what matters for purposes of WP:NPOV is how many scientists either of us can count, now, who support either model. Arguing what things would be like under different conditions is immaterial. I would prefer to keep additional responses in this thread at Talk:Big Bang. --Christopher Thomas 17:35, 18 November 2005 (UTC)

That answer totally ignores the fact of systemic bias and glosses over the distortion of the count. And it's not "what it would be like under different conditions", it's the "use of biased samples" that is the point. But, I will continue the talk in T:BB. JDR 20:49, 18 November 2005 (UTC)


computronium

Thank you for filling out the computronium article. I hope you don't mind my block move of a big chunk over to the low-power article. --DavidCary 19:45, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Not a problem. One of these days I'm going to track down the references I'd used for both that section and the rest of computronium, as they really should have been noted on the page. In particular there was a very interesting article on the limits to scaling of electronics both for FETs and independent of implementation. I'll add this to low-power when I find it again. --Christopher Thomas 20:01, 30 November 2005 (UTC)

Depleted uranium RfC

Your input to an RfC at Talk:Depleted uranium#Request for Comments would be appreciated. DV8 2XL 07:39, 15 December 2005 (UTC)

Comments posted. I'm afraid I'm not in a position to contribute much right now. --Christopher Thomas 21:20, 16 December 2005 (UTC)


Solidity of solid objects

Your edit in GR was good, but the comment is less so. Electromagnetic forces have little to do with the solidity of objects, the Earth's surface, etc. It is the Pauli Exclusion Principle that establishes a Fermi level (see Fermi energy) which requires a great expenditure of energy to compress solid bodies such as rocks or steel, or to cause them to interpenetrate. With sufficient pressure, or at high temperature, the effect can be overcome; indeed the collapse to a neutron star is caused by the failure of electron degeneracy pressure to stop the collapse.Carrionluggage 06:39, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

I am aware of degeneracy pressure. However, it is electromagnetic interactions between valence electrons and nuclei that makes objects rigid in the first place at terrestrial pressures, and between all electrons and their parent nuclei that gives us atoms at all (though Pauli exclusion is indeed also vital in causing atoms to exist). Without electromagnetic interactions, you'd wind up with a big featureless ball of fermi gas or fermi liquid (depending on temperature).--Christopher Thomas 06:59, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Well, we are reaching closure. Truly, if you refer to rigidity in terms of resistance to shear stress, then the E&M forces do help create atoms, molecules, crystals - so that's right. If one is talking of resistance to compression and to interpenetration, I still think the Fermi level dominates. In neutron stars, one does not have much rigidity (except some people believe they may have crystallized cores and then I am not sure about E&M effects), and the Fermi level determined the relative incompressibility. Same in a while dwarf but there it's electron degeneracy, not neutron degeneracy (though in a neutron star there is significant electron degeneracy, too). Carrionluggage 20:47, 27 December 2005 (UTC)

Hi,

A couple of your recent reactions made me think I must have stepped on your toes, for which I apologize. My edits may get sloppy when my patience runs short; however, I think we're both on the same side, so if you spot errors that I've made, do fix them. I'm pretty sure I won't complain. Thanks, in general, I do appreciate your presence here on WP. linas 22:12, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

I'm sorry if I gave that impression; it wasn't my intent. While I did get my feathers ruffled a bit at WP Pseudoscience and Casimir effect, this mostly just reflects that we have (horror of horrors) slightly different views on "see also" sections :). Thank you too for your efforts - Casimir effect was a particularly impressive marathon. --Christopher Thomas 22:16, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Thanks

Dear Christopher, thanks for cleaning out some recent vandalism on the page devoted to radiation and nuclear accidents. I was the editor who separated the radiation and nuclear accident.Cadmium 21:15, 5 January 2006 (UTC)

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