Category talk:Electricity concepts

"Concepts"

It will be important to keep the definition of concepts narrow here, otherwise every single article in the electricity categories could end up here, making the category uselessly vague. A concept is an abstract idea, not a physical phenomenon or a measurable quantity. Srleffler (talk) 03:00, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with your sentiment but I think you have gone mad in depopulating the category. For instance you remvoved Displacement current on the grounds that it is a type of current. No it is not. A current is a flow of charge and this does not represent movement of charge, but rather, rate of change of electric flux. Sure, it has units of current, but that does not make it a type of current any more than torque is a type of work.

Your exclusion of anything that is measurable is also puzzling. Everything in electrical science is measurable, otherwise it would't be, well...science. For instance Transient response, one of only two pages remaining in the cat, is certainly measurable on an oscilloscope. SpinningSpark 16:35, 1 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I may have cut too much. When I started Dielectric mirror was listed here, despite being neither related to electricity nor a "concept". The category also contained a random assortment of electricity articles based on such a broad idea of what an "electricity concept" was that it wasn't clear to me that there were any electricity articles that wouldn't belong in this category. I started filing a CfD, but decided to give it a chance. The category can be useful if "concept" is taken narrowly: referring to an abstract idea, not a physical thing.

"Measurable" isn't quite what I had in mind when I wrote "measurable quantity". Perhaps "physical quantity" better captures what I had in mind. If it is a physical thing you can measure, it is not an abstract concept. I think you are right about Displacement current, though. It isn't really a physical thing but rather an abstract idea we invented to make our understanding of electromagnetism simpler.

The category being almost empty doesn't trouble me. I started out thinking that we didn't need this category at all. If we can't find enough articles that are clearly on electricity concepts, then we just don't need this category.--Srleffler (talk) 03:04, 4 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

One can advance the same rationale for electric potential being a concept as you did for displacement current. The top-level thing that leaps out at me as being a concept is the idea of field. That makes an argument for electric field and magnetic field (even though those are also defined, measurable parameters). Field gives rise to the concept of flux offering electric flux and magnetic flux as candidates. In network analysis where fields are largely confined, the concept of circuit dominates. Sadly, electric circuit is a redirect, but I think redirects can still take categories. Further concepts that come to mind without having to think too hard about it are port (circuit theory), two-port network, and virtual ground. SpinningSpark 15:36, 4 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

True enough, but before we go down that path we need to address the question do we need this? Does it actually make sense to categorize topics based on whether they are "concepts"? I'm not sure that it does.--Srleffler (talk) 05:46, 6 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree with that due to the difficulty of deciding what is, and what is not a concept. But I don't think we should dispense with the category in the electrical science (by the way, such a better name for the category) field while the parent category exists. It seems to me that that discussion should be happening further up the tree. There are way more dubious entries at the top level and in other branches. Also, we shouldn't decide anything on a poorly watched category talk page unless it is advertised somewhere else first. SpinningSpark 10:46, 6 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For now, I'm going to stick with my original thought that categorizing things as "concepts" makes sense only if we stick to a very narrow definition of that term. I added virtual ground because that is explicitly an abstraction. I didn't add the others you mentioned because they are more concrete. If we added those, then nearly everything would be a "concept". Ultimately all of science is a matter of creating concepts that describe the natural world. We never really understand reality; we just create concepts that we can understand and that produce correct predictions about how nature will behave under certain circumstances. --Srleffler (talk) 17:02, 6 November 2022 (UTC)[reply]