Talk:Scale relativity

Article Update

Dear Wikipedians,

I made an in-depth update of the article. I’m not a native english speaker, nor a regular Wikipedia editor, so I hope you will forgive my eventual clumsiness.

I did my best to keep the article nontechnical and accessible to a wide public. However, many aspects of the theory are highly technical (especially using advanced fractal mathematics). I focused on explaining the main concepts, and showing how the theoretical predictions compare to the observed values. I provided many references, so technically-minded readers can check the details.

I left out the discussion about angular momentums, which I found was not very pedagogical, and maybe too technical. I preferred to leave space for more fundamental insights and results of the theory. Of course, if it could be better formulated and introduced, and if many of you think this section is important, please feel free to rework it and to re-introduce it.

For those interested to contribute, here is what remains to be done:

- correct English mistakes

- correct syntactical mistakes. The maths may not be very clean or standard. The article-rewrite was exported from a LibreOffice document (see [[1]]). I exported the ODT file to the mediawiki syntax, I don’t know how reliable this process is. I thought the existence of this PDF may be useful to know in case there is any conversion issue.

- mention and/or link scale relativity in other wikipedia articles (especially the ones where I put a link to the “main article”).

- more technical explanations, derivations and equations may or should be added in the future, especially for professional physicists. Ideally, maybe this should be followed up by splitting the article into two: a technical and comprehensive exposition, and an “Introduction to scale relativity” Introduction_to_scale_relativity. Maybe something similar to Introduction_to_general_relativity ?

I’ll finish as soon as possible to:

- update internal links within the document

- update links in Wikipedia (I gave the full URL instead)

- update the referencing system to match the one of wikipedia

Thank you for your attention, and in thanks advance if you wish to help.

Best regards,

Clementvidal (talk) 16:08, 31 May 2015 (UTC)

Linking to Process Physics

I recently stumbled upon scale relativity and it sounds very interesting.

I wonder whether it would be appropriate to include a link to Process Physics here too?

PP is similar in that it proposes a fractal structure for space. Both theories would be considered 'fringe physics' too, wouldn't they?

Just a thought really Danwills (talk) 05:25, 20 March 2008 (UTC)

Criticism

Scale relativity theory has no recognized value among physicists. Its reputation in France was roughly reduced to a mere mediatic phenomenon made by some popular science journals, spreading the myth of a genial discoverer... This myth was based on the fact that Nottale's writing ways made it practically impossible to criticize his ideas, because... his empty "theory" was a mere game of introductions and announcements, that did not present any precise idea that could be a matter of criticism. In other words, it seemed like "not even false". The few scientists that tried to examine what it was about, just gave up because there was nothing to understand there. So it required some courage and time to find and write down any concrete reason to disagree, in order to put any stop to the mediatic worship of this assumed misunderstood genius, which mosts scientists won't bother doing as soon as they noticed there was nothing interesting for physics to see there. Years ago I developed this criticism in French. I'm sorry I did not translate it into English, and I have myself other more important things to do in life than to work on this translation. Some other physicists approved my remarks, but of course as usual they did not take the time and risks to work further on explanations or to make any public mentions on this subject. Since I developed this criticism fully enough, which then appeared for years among the first few google results on "Nottale" or "Relativité d'échelle" (the French for "scale relativity), no defender of Scale Relativity had anything effective to reply but they just gave up or kept silent (except one that published back a lot of insults but nothing concrete); the mediatic enthusiasm in France for Nottale's ideas stopped, and it did not interest anybody anymore.

I'm sorry to see more people still waste their time with this non-theory, just because they did not yet examine the deep contents to see themselves that it is empty (if they know physics well enough for this, of course) and because they don't understand French. All what I can offer you now, apart from my references page in French that includes some English links, is this recent little mention about Nottale linking to my criticism. Other criticism: http://antispirituality.net/nottale-scale-relativity. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.222.83.40 (talk) 10:54, 3 July 2016 (UTC)

One more thing: why did not this article link to the French equivalent ? To not let visitors be aware of the bad reputation of this "theory" in France, through the inclusions of the criticism motives to the French version of the article that nobody dared to edit away ? Okay, I'll do this now. --Spoirier (talk) 00:33, 14 January 2009 (UTC)

Comment on the comment above

I definitely disagree with the comment above. Mathematically scale relativity is no more wrong than Leibniz. With some work most of the statements cab be made precise as already demonstrated by several authors. If there is interest I can elaborate further. It seems that the above author has no scientific credibility and a personal streak at attacking Nottale. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 80.236.210.203 (talk • contribs) 129.93.33.196

Comment on the comment on the comment above. If one does a bit of research into 'how' Einstein developed his GR theory, one learns that it was not nearly so 'well-developed' as the polished final product. Nevertheless, other people of superior mathematical talent took his ideas and found ways to make them work, and today GR is considered the preeminent physical theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.93.33.196 (talk • contribs)

Scale Relativity is an attempt to eliminate infinities that occur at extreme high energy in General Relativity. Scale of one is General Relativity that covers nearly all situations. The intent of Scale Relativity is to allow higher scales in some extreme high energy cases. Validity of Scale Relativity depends on the concept of Frame Dragging predicted from General Relativity. Claims for and against Frame Dragging have been made with supporting data published about deflection of Earth satellites. Opponents have questioned the accuracies. If Frame Dragging becomes widely accepted then the structure of space time comes into question about how much stress energy can be contained in a dragged frame. In this regard the space inside a fast moving object as well as the space out side near by are included in the Dragged Frame. Scale Relativity allows the quantum state of space time to change when energy density exceeds a critical value. In this way infinities do not occur.

The U and R processes of Roger Penrose give an alternative view of scales and how they might occur. The U process is a an evolution like increasing energy density in General Relativity. The R process is a change of quantum state in space time when the energy density has reached a limit. After the R process there occurs another U process that represents a scale of two or more.

Raising the quantum state of space time represents an increase of angular momentum, which creates unfilled energy states. It isn't proven whether or not space time has angular momentum separate from the objects that move in it, so the concept is theoretical. General Relativity covers such a wide range of energies that it is doubtful whether or not a scale higher than one can be observed outside a fast moving object. Astrojed (talk) 23:50, 20 November 2019 (UTC)

Bekenstein Bound?

How does scale relativity deal with the Bekenstein bound? 70.247.168.170 (talk) 03:44, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Non-NPOV and other issues

Validity of the subject aside, it's written in a distinctly unencyclopedic form with some subtle non-NPOV aspects. It relies on a single site for citations, and given the mention I've seen in the Talk page here and a few other locations, it seems like there should be a Criticism section. Unfortunately, the major criticisms are over my head or in a language I don't speak or read, so I can't get this started fairly. Martin Blank (talk) 20:48, 7 May 2012 (UTC)

Related approaches

The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause.

For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.

--SSA7471 (talk) 15:47, 12 December 2015 (UTC)

Tidying up references and citations

I have started to tidy up the references and citations here, so far initial preparation. A lot more needs to be done and for a while the resulting display will be inconsistent, with some items finished before others. Since I won't be changing the content itself unless I happen to notice a particular problem, there is probably no need to add a "work in progress" template. --Mirokado (talk) 21:20, 18 May 2016 (UTC)

The initial preparation added 4208 bytes to the article, but 10800 bytes have been removed already with a dozen or so citations more or less completed, so this exercise will clearly be worthwhile. Doing the first few manually helped me understand what was needed. It will be more reliable as well as faster if I write a "little script" to finish the job, so there will probably be a break of a few days before any more similar edits, but a nice long weekend is coming up... --Mirokado (talk) 16:21, 23 May 2016 (UTC)

The main tidying up is now finished. Source size was reduced from 127203 to 92219 bytes, a saving of 34983 bytes, a little more than 25% of the starting size!

The following citation is not currently used in the article, moved here in case we need it later:

• Nottale, L. (2003a). "La relativité d'échelle à l'épreuve des faits". Pour la Science (in French).

Some mopping up is still needed, for example adding more ISBNs, checking citation title capitalisation, adding the |language=fr param where necessary, perhaps I will return to this article after a break for a while. --Mirokado (talk) 21:13, 1 June 2016 (UTC)

Discussion with SSA7471

Hello SSA7471,

You deleted entirely 4 sections and about 9 subsections of the article (-11,080 bytes). I didn’t see any reason for the deletion of sections “Singularity and evolutionary tree”, “Cognitive aspects”, “Sociological analysis”, or “Reactions”, so I re-established them.

Regarding the general justification of your edit “removed all content related to quantum gravity since that is just wrong and clarified the status that SR holds within mainstream physics & what SR really is (an QM interpretation)”, I think you do have an important point, that you already made in the talk page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Scale_relativity#Related_approaches):

“The mentioned related approaches are all wrong because they refer to quantum gravity approaches and scale relativity is NOT a quantum gravity theory (this is a common misconception). It's not a quantum theory of spacetime but a spacetime theory of quantum theory (QM/QFT). Spacetime is not the result but the cause. For correct related approaches one should look into similar QM interpretations (because that's what scale relativity really is) like Nelson stochastic mechanics or Bohm mechanics.”

Although the matter gets more technical, to take fully into account your valid point, I added two sections about Nelson stochastic mechanics and Bohm mechanics:

---

Nelson stochastic mechanics

At first sight, scale relativity and Nelson's stochastic mechanics share features, such as the derivation of the Schrödinger equation.

Nelson, Edward. 1966. “Derivation of the Schrödinger Equation from Newtonian Mechanics.” Physical Review 150 (4): 1079–85. doi:10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRev.150.1079.

However, Nelson's mechanics has been refuted, with mutitime correlations in repeated measurements (see: Wang, M. S., and Wei-Kuang Liang. 1993. “Comment on ‘Repeated Measurements in Stochastic Mechanics.’” Physical Review D 48 (4): 1875–77. doi:10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875. http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevD.48.1875.)

By contrast, scale relativity is not founded on a stochastic approach, and doesn’t fall into the refutation of stochastic mechanics:   “Here, the fractality of the space-time continuum is derived from its nondifferentiability, it is constrained by the principle of scale relativity and the Dirac equation is derived as an integral of the geodesic equation. This is therefore not a stochastic approach in its essence, even though stochastic variables must be introduced as a consequence of the new geometry, so it does not come under the contradictions encountered by stochastic mechanics.” (Nottale 2011, 265.)

Bohm’s mechanics

Bohm's mechanics is a hidden variables theory, which is not the case of scale relativity. In this way, they are quite different.   "In the scale relativity description, there is no longer any separation between a “microscopic” description and an emergent “macroscopic” description (at the level of the wave function), since both are accounted for in the double scale space and position space representation."" (Nottale 2011, 360)

---

However the title of the section is: “Scale relativity and other approaches”. So, by definition the “other approaches” will be different from scale relativity! The purpose of the section is precisely to help the Wikipedia reader situate scale relativity in the landscape of options to unify QM and GR. There are two ways to try to unify QM and GR. To start from QM, or to start from relativity. Quantum gravity theories explore the former, scale relativity the latter.

Otherwise, I do agree that ScR provides a QM interpretation, but it provides also many other insights (e.g. at macroscopic scales), so it can not be reduced to yet an other QM interpretation. Regarding your statement “Scale relativity is considered fringe science by the vast majority of the physics community and mostly ignored.” It seems to be your personal opinion, and as such it is a NPOV violation, so I deleted it. I guess it's not obvious to give an objective definition of "fringe science"?

For information, according to Google Scholar, Laurent Nottale has an h-index of 32, and totals 4418 academic citations. This simply doesn’t qualify as ignorance from the physics community. But if you can provide secondary sources to support your claim, please do add them with a NPOV style.

I can understand this part of your comment:

“It's a common misconception that scale relativity is a theory about quantum gravity and as such is a competitor to String theory, loop quantum gravity and others. This is wrong. Scale relativity says nothing about gravity, classical or quantum. It's a spacetime theory about ordinary quantum mechanics, not theory about quantum spacetime."”

However, it depends at how you look at the issue. If you assume that quantum gravity is the only possible starting assumption to try to unify QM and GR, then you’re right, they are not in competition. They could be seen as competitors if the aim is to find a coherent picture of QM and relativity. For the purpose of writing this Wikipedia article, I’m personally not interested in competition, but more in an exposition of the landscape of options to unify QM and relativity. I have done my best to integrate your core points, but please let me know in this talk page if you have further ideas to improve the article.

Best, Clementvidal (talk) 08:05, 19 August 2016 (UTC)

singularity and evolutionary trees??

from other fields, one tends to be dismayed by the formidable mathematical-complexity of physics, that tends to discount any possibility of any useful contribution unless one has been dealing with the specific formulas & math for years on end... yet here, we can see an example that those from the physics & mathematical fields, may also, at least at times, be poorly adept in other fields as well, to the point of seeming as imbeciles... degenerated into little more than common cult-prophets, but that attempt their prophecy thru calculations, but that don't even have a few percent of the needed variables entailed, mainly from outside their field, to make such calculations! ...those from the evolutionary biology field, or general biology, altho 'properly-obsessed', don't seem quite as 'vastly-obsessed' with 'grand predictive models', of the future, everything, or whatever else, as these sorts, who seem to feel an uber-need for omniscience, totality, & congruence, even trying to apply their mentality to various fields in biology! rather than at least some contentment as well in the 'high-mathematical' 'present-value' & 'special-individuality' of what they observe, and keeping moderation in their obsessions... but, diversity in general, is special too, as well when it comes to 'scientific brainware'... (and we must remember, that these 'densely-periodic' and 'grand-ecstatic-fulminations' of theirs are good at raising financing... perhaps they are not random, are formulaic somehow, & follow some type of mathematical-law that biologists can help determine? ...as the physicists, mathematicians, & engineers are at least 'partially-biological', still? yes?? in these 'relatively-early' times???) ~yw

The very inclusion of Singularity and Evolutionary Tree in an otherwise purely physics related article is an absurdity unless you are talking about a Black Hole singularity and your evolutionary tree is about how stars evolve. The Singularity mentioned is about the postulated merger of technology and man and the subsequent end of Life as we Know It. The Evolutionary Tree mentioned is about the Evolution of Species and not other kinds of evolution (which word means "Change" and not much more - add vinegar to baking soda and watch as the mixture EVOLVES CO2 gas.). 50.247.247.81 (talk) 18:09, 15 December 2017 (UTC)

Tagged as fringe

I tagged this article as WP:FRINGE. This all seems to be highly questionable, as some others have noted. It seems to be very closely wrapped up with Mohammed El Naschie, which should set off alarm bells, although I don't know for sure if that's simply because El Naschie has glommed on to this and such association shouldn't be held against it.

On a side note, for such a fringe idea, the article itself has way way way too much detail. I'm personally at a loss as far as what should be done with this, and suggestions would be very welcome. --Deacon Vorbis (talk) 17:11, 21 April 2017 (UTC)

Better to read a ten-page wikipedia article than to buy Nottale's latest book blindly for 150 euros.— Preceding unsigned comment added by 129.93.33.196 (talk) 22:28, 15 May 2019 (UTC)

Deacon Vorbis, well, enthusiasts of scale relativity have tried to "develop" it by connecting it with El Naschie's nonsense and publishing in El Naschie's journal [2][3][4]. And in his book, Nottale mentions El Naschie's work approvingly and thanks him for support [5]. (This book was published in 2011; the Chaos, Solitons & Fractals scandal broke in 2008.) And Nottale contributed to a Festschrift in El Naschie's honor. XOR'easter (talk) 22:15, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

Oh wow, I had forgotten all about this. Thanks for taking a look at it. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 22:18, 4 February 2020 (UTC)

|Deacon Vorbis] your claim that the SR group develops the Scale relativity theory in the direction of El Naschie's theory is entirely nonsensical. You are 20 years off the current literature. By claiming this you only show blatant ignorance // DP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.49.65.90 (talk) 22:00, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, I'm entirely ignorant of the subject, as I freely admitted in my initial post. But there was a strong consensus to merge this to Nottale's article, so please stop undoing this. –Deacon Vorbis (carbon • videos) 22:09, 24 April 2020 (UTC)

Discussing and motivating deletions

User Dlthewave deleted 6999 bytes without any other justification than "rm some of the worst editorializing". Please explain! Why is it "the worst editorializing"? Is there a way you could improve things without bluntly deleting without any justification? Thanks.

User XOR'easter deleted -86,714 bytes ‎with no other justification than "stubify: the promotionalism was extravagant, the descriptions of established science were inaccurate, the secondary sources that do exist are superficial and/or dubious, and no distinction was made between El Naschie and actual physics". Please explain and argue in detail all your points. Otherwise they remain only your vague personal opinions. In the meantime that we solve this in this talk page, I re-established oldid: 938866469 (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Scale_relativity&oldid=938866469).

Other moderators are welcome too!

Clementvidal (talk) 19:14, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Restored the stubbification; too much WP:FRINGE-violating material. A total rewrite is needed per Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard#Scale_relativity. VQuakr (talk) 19:55, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

The burden of proof is on those who wish to advance a fringe theory as respectable. The demand that we explain and argue in detail all [our] points is asking for lessons in basic physics, which is not what Wikipedia's talk pages are for. XOR'easter (talk) 20:16, 20 February 2020 (UTC)

Note: this was one single post by user Clementvidal.

Hi, Thanks XOR'easter for pointing me to the discussion of Fringe theories (here https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Fringe_theories/Noticeboard/Archive_69#Scale_relativity), which I was not aware of. So you did include arguments for the "blurbization" of the article, which shows that you value rational discussion and decision-making. I hope to continue in this spirit from now on. I'll reply to the discussion, and put it here to centralize it, to make it easier for others to join. talk) 21:37, 1 February 2020 (UTC) wrote: The article Scale relativity is pretty amazingly bad. I am (and probably the many others who contributed) sorry that you found it not up to the criteria of a good wikipedia article. I'm looking for your constructive comments and attitude on how to improve it. It is entirely an advertisement for a fringe theory that barely anyone has even paid attention to as such. Why do you write that it's an advertisement? Is citing peer-reviewed scientific papers to support or illustrate claims advertising for you? Please elaborate. The explanations of actual science are terrible, Please give examples and illustrate your personal judgement, so the improvement of the article can be constructive. most of the references are to the inventor himself, First, the article starts with the remark that both Ord & Nottale came to a very similar idea. But it is a fact that Nottale developed the theory the most afterwards. So the references reflect the reality. Now, if this fact is disturbing, we could add the many publications and authors citing Nottale's 1993 book for example (there are 1047 citations as of this date:https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=12603670399921758541&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en). But I fear that the article would have to become extremely technical as many of these citations address technical aspects of the theory. Since I focused the re-writing of the article for a wide wikipedian audience, I did not include these. But please feel free to dig and add some, where appropriate, if you think it would improve the whole. the claims of what it explains are impossibly wide-ranging and grandiose, I don't see any objection here. Why couldn't a new theory be wide-ranging and grandiose? Where is the impossibility according to you? and the few criticisms aren't even reported properly. Please explain why it's not reported properly. But please feel free to expand the criticism section in an appropriate manner, since it seems that you want to focus on this aspect. I'd suggest burning it to the ground, Why do you employ such a destructive metaphor and attitude? I'm curious about why you feel so aggressive about the article. After all, it's just an article about physical theory amongst others. Replying to: PaleoNeonate – 17:59, 2 February 2020 (UTC) Is International Journal of Modern Physics peer reviewed (I've seen conflicting information on its publisher, World Scientific)? Of course it is! ::... And fractal cosmology is yet another article that needs work... — Agreed! :::I haven't been able to find any indication of serious follow-up on Nottale's paper by anyone else. What do you mean? For example, his 1989 paper in Modern Physical is cited 200 times (https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=8756562408457819040&as_sdt=2005&sciodt=0,5&hl=en). Isn't it a serious follow-up? Or are none of these citing articles serious? Have you read them all? Or maybe you didn't know about Google Scholar? If not, I recommend using it to explore the citation networks. And throwing together the words "fractal" and "cosmology" could mean any one of many different things, with varying levels of respectability. XOR'easter (talk) 20:42, 2 February 2020 (UTC) Agreed, terms need to be defined. ::::Interestingly, a major 2015 rewrite was also published as an essay on academia.edu with "thanks to Laurent Nottale for many corrections and clarifications." –dlthewave ☎ 21:22, 2 February 2020 (UTC) Yes, I asked Nottale to re-read my rewrite proposal (which he kindly did) to avoid putting mistakes on Wikipedia. What's the issue here? What would you like to imply? If I have had any intention to hide his feedback, I obviously wouldn't have written this in the acknowledgments on a document publicly available! :::::So many statements in that betray a lack of actual familiarity with science or mathematics. It could be, I'm a philosopher of/with science, not a practicing physicist. But please argue and give more examples. Searching for the most important paths relevant for quantum particles, Feynman noticed that such paths were very irregular on small scales, i.e. infinite and non-differentiable. No, the path integral isn't about finding the "most important paths", and the idea that typical paths are non-differentiable goes back to Brownian motion. Thank you very much for this remark. The Feynman and Hibbs statement about the geometry of the typical path in quantum mechanics is a consequence of the path integral approach, not equivalent to it. "Most important" was indeed unclear. We could say that "Feynman has characterized the paths which contribute the most to the path integral as infinite and non-differentiable". The statement about Brownian motion is confusing. This is not the question here. This means that in between two points, a particle can have not one path, but an infinity of potential paths. This is trivially true for any two points in a plane. Good point! I obviously meant "not one 'shortest path" The principle of relativity says that physical laws should be valid in all coordinate systems. No, it doesn't. Please (re-)read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_relativity and explain why. You're not arguing here, just stating a (wrong) opinion, without reference or argument. This principle has been applied to states of position (the origin and orientation of axes), as well as to the states of movement of coordinate systems (speed, acceleration). Acceleration is not inertial motion. Why do you imply that this sentence says that acceleration is inertial motion? And so on. Please do go on, otherwise your judgment is based on reading up to section 2.1, which shows a very shallow and limited effort. And please only go on if you do give arguments and references to back up your claims. :::::Then come the "applications" to biology, geography, the technological singularity... XOR'easter (talk) 21:44, 2 February 2020 (UTC) And what is the issue here? Please explicit your objections. Otherwise it's just too clear that you looked only at the table of contents. Nottale was a director at CNRS, but "director" (as opposed to "director general") means the leader of a research unit, of which there are about a thousand. It's comparable to "principal investigator" in significance. That's correct! :::::Because I hate myself, I read the paper where he claims to derive the Schrödinger equation. It was about what anyone familiar with fringe physics would expect: unclear writing covering up unclear thinking (deliberately or not). I'm sorry you found the paper unclear. Fortunately, this particular result of the derivation of Schrödinger equation has also been reported and derived by others. Read the restored version to have the detailed references (e.g. Dubois 2000; Jumarie 2001; Cresson 2003; Ben Adda and Cresson 2004; 2005; Jumarie 2006; 2007). The closest approach to a substantial point was that, if you throw imaginary numbers into a diffusion equation, you'll get something that looks like the Schrödinger equation. But in scale relativity it does not just "look like" it, it IS the Schrodinger equation. This is well-known, and others have done a better and more careful job of the analogy. (To pick an example that springs to mind, Risken's textbook on the Fokker–Planck equation does a good job adapting techniques from quantum physics to solve diffusion problems.) It's almost too vacuous to criticize. XOR'easter (talk) 18:13, 3 February 2020 (UTC) So if "it's too vacuous to criticize", this means that you see all this as not new and obviously correct. Probably a good start to go further, then? :Definitely fringe Depending on the definition of "fringe", I think we can agree. Although does "not mainstream" imply fringe? Does an author such as Laurent Nottale having an h-index of 34 and cited 5296 times (https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=xX9J7ggAAAAJ&hl=en&oi=ao) count as fringe scientist? My answer would be yes, compared to the impact that the theory should have. But this is just my personal -and informed- opinion. My point here is that these scientific metrics are pretty high for a researcher. To give you an idea, I cite the page on the h-index: Little systematic investigation has been done on how the h-index behaves over different institutions, nations, times and academic fields. Hirsch suggested that, for physicists, a value for h of about 12 might be typical for advancement to tenure (associate professor) at major [US] research universities. A value of about 18 could mean a full professorship, 15–20 could mean a fellowship in the American Physical Society, and 45 or higher could mean membership in the United States National Academy of Sciences. Hirsch estimated that after 20 years a "successful scientist" would have an h-index of 20, an "outstanding scientist" would have an h-index of 40, and a "truly unique" individual would have an h-index of 60. and very self-congratulatory (some of the promotion has been removed since this discussion started, thanks for that)... Where? Anyway, please do edit to tone this down where appropriate. But please refrain from deleting nearly everything, as the article was based on 129 citations, mostly peer-reviewed academic publications, so I don't see a good and rational editing spirit here. —PaleoNeonate – 01:20, 4 February 2020 (UTC) My first impression is that the AfD got it right, and this is a notable subject (that is in need of a complete rewrite). Methinks stubbify and start over? VQuakr (talk) 01:48, 4 February 2020 (UTC) All right, let's re-read the article section by section, then? I mean, the physics literature contains over 2.4 million papers, so it does take a little work to stand out. You do contradict yourself here. You wrote earlier "the claims of what it explains are impossibly wide-ranging and grandiose". So it does stand out (assuming it's correct). All we've got here is self-promotion, Does a theory have a "self"? some fannish interest, What do you mean? Maybe scientific theories can have their fans, but that shouldn't be the primary driver of science. occasional brushes with nominal respectability in marginal journals, No, please do your homework, many of the journals where the theory was published are the most respected in physics. a negative book review, So what? There is also a positive review here (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/259373681). and a withering post on Physics Overflow. A post on a minimally moderated forum has definitive authority for you? There are actually interesting and balanced discussions if you look carefully. It's the sort of thing that there's almost no critique of, That's rather true, unfortunately. because there's virtually nothing substantial to critique, so only a very few even take the time to bother. I definitely disagree with the reason you put forth. There is a very substantial body of knowledge. It may be the opposite, that there is so much substance, that it may be hard and intimidating to even start. At least you went up with argument until section 2.1 of the wikipedia article, thanks for that effort. XOR'easter (talk) 04:39, 4 February 2020 (UTC) Per VQuakr, I stubbified the page. XOR'easter (talk) 21:55, 4 February 2020 (UTC) Update: the article's main creator has reverted the stubbification and been reverted in turn. XOR'easter (talk) 20:18, 20 February 2020 (UTC) I reverted the page back, adding edits ensuing from the constructive criticisms of this thread and am looking forward to further re-write indeed to improve and remove any of my (inevitable) biases. Clementvidal (talk) 11:57, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

There was absolutely no consensus in favor of restoring the deleted material. Your superficial changes do not address the fundamental problem that this is a non-notable idea. You assert that I contradict myself by saying that scale relativity does not stand out in the scientific literature while also observing that "the claims of what it explains are impossibly wide-ranging and grandiose". There is no contradiction here. "Theories" that make wide-ranging and grandiose claims are commonplace. I am restoring the consensus version again. XOR'easter (talk) 14:32, 7 April 2020 (UTC)

About consensus, I think we need to put things in perspective. A detailed version was available since May 31 2015. It was then gradually improved since then by many wikipedia contributors during almost 5 years. To me, this version thus seems to have been the consensus. Based on an open suggestion by VQuakr ("this is a notable subject (that is in need of a complete rewrite). Methinks stubbify and start over? (talk) 01:48, 4 February 2020 (UTC))", you rather boldly decided to indeed "stubbify" (=delete almost everything) of the article, leading to a basic, uninformative -and I would add biased- stub version. I propose to stick with the terms "detailed version" and "stub version" as the term that you used "consensus version" is obviously ambiguous.

Regarding your statement that "Your superficial changes do not address the fundamental problem that this is a non-notable idea". First, the "superficial changes" are really useful and relevant, so thanks again for triggering them. I did address above the issue of notability through h-index and citation counts considerations, so I'm not repeating them here. Regarding whether you contradict yourself or not, if you believe a priori that the theory is wrong, then you're absolutely correct, you don't contradict yourself, and I'm sorry that this hurt your feelings.

Where do we go from there? XOR'easter and I obviously disagree. As I explicitly wrote in my replies above, I'm not denying that the article can be improved, and I'm willing to go forward and help. The question is thus: is it better to start from scratch with the stub version or the detailed version? Can we try to reach a consensus on this? What do others think? Should we organize a vote?Clementvidal (talk) 09:40, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Yes, a total rewrite is needed. A consensus has already been reached on the fringe noticeboard, so rehashing that decision here isn't productive. See WP:TNT. The new version of this article will need to use mainstream sources nearly exclusively, with sourcing from or related to Nottale used sparingly and always in support of sources with a mainstream perspective. See WP:FRINGE for a relevant guideline, particularly the section WP:FRIND. VQuakr (talk) 19:11, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

I did address above the issue of notability through h-index and citation counts considerations, so I'm not repeating them here. No, the issue of notability is not addressed. Reporting raw citation numbers from something so easily gamed as Google Scholar is not a useful course of action for fringe topics. We need substantial discussion in secondary and tertiary sources outside the coterie of enthusiasts. Virtually none exist. The point of providing a link to Physics Overflow, a forum with much useful content but definitely not what we would consider a reliable source, is that there's nothing better — because nobody cares. XOR'easter (talk) 21:01, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

Gaming h-index or citations is nearly impossible. Citations are obviously secondary sources, so you have it all wrong here. Nottale only has 5319 citations as of today, so 5319 (minus self-citations if you want to be rigorous) secondary sources, that care about the theory. Clementvidal (talk) 09:12, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

I delimited the above post with a box because it was very confusing. There are embedded copy-pasted messages and signatures, suggesting that other people have posted in between, but it's not the case. —PaleoNeonate – 08:45, 8 April 2020 (UTC)

Thank you it was not obvious to me how to make such replies clearer.Clementvidal (talk) 09:40, 9 April 2020 (UTC)

The contents of the article are BRUTALLY deleted. There is absolutely no scientific consensus about this. All I see are unfounded opinions of anonymous editors. Most of them probably have no scientific credentials. For me, this is a reprehensible manifestation of groupthink and thought police mentality. I intend to start a dispute resolution if this "war of words" continues. //DP — Preceding unsigned comment added by 213.49.65.90 (talk) 16:42, 25 April 2020 (UTC)

Agreed. Clementvidal (talk) 09:18, 28 April 2020 (UTC)

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