Talk:Spacetime/Archive 10

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Article balance

This article is currently heavily skewed towards a relativistic interpretation of spacetime. I'd like to propose that some of this be split off into an article on relativistic spacetime, leaving a summary in this article. That would allow for the remaining content to be developed more evenly, and would allow for a focus on important topics that are currently being overlooked in this article. In particular, I feel the current article is really weak on Galilean/Newtonian spacetime, curved spacetime, and quantized spacetime, and the focus on relativistic spacetime is undue and disproportionate. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 05:57, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Another embryonic area of the article is vectors. The modern notion of spacetime is fundamentally a vector space notion, so this is worrisome. I've added some obvious things that seemed to be missing, but I'm sure I've overlooked others. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 07:43, 24 May 2017 (UTC)

Excessive scare quotes

I'm seeing a lot of "scare quoting" in the article that's not necessary, as in most cases, it doesn't help the reader understand anything more clearly, and it adds a POV flavor that isn't warranted. Further, in most cases, the quoted terms are actually the technical terms in use, so creating "scare distance" is actually counterproductive, as it actively encourages readers to fail to associate terminology intended to be associated. I'm going to start removing instances as I come across them. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 10:54, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Scare quotes are defined as follows: Are quotation marks placed around a word or phrase to signal that a term is being used in a non-standard, ironic, or otherwise special sense. I didn’t add them (my contributions were limited almost entirely to the lede, which you twice tossed out). But whoever employed the quotation marks obviously did so in order to set off specialty lingo in an effort to make exceedingly complex and arcane subject matter easier to parse. You don’t see it that way and are wading in doing your own thing with great conviction.

Your comments here on this talk page come across less as “discussion” but of “pronouncements of what you did and why.” After another editor and I slaved over a period of many days on the lede and fine-tuned it, you threw away and only three days later did you even pretend to go through the motions of “discussing” (now there's a scare quote) the matter here on this talk page. Mere lip service.

This whole experience highlights the shortcoming of Wikipedia: absolutely anyone with any etiquette can wade in and throw out hundreds of man-hours of other editors’ efforts. This sort of tedious experience is precisely why—after years on Wikipedia—I mostly abandoned the project. I’ve certainly lost interest in this article, so go knock yourself out. Bye. Greg L (talk) 22:50, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Your definition shows exactly my point. You just added manifold in scare quotes. I understand that you did it to add emphasis, but that's exactly the point I was making above: emphasis isn't warranted. You aren't using manifold in a non-standard, ironic, or otherwise special sense. You are just adding emphasis. And the emphasis is only based on your perception. That seems to be the very definition of POV. You even seem to recognize that this is POV in your statements above. I'm all for making the article simpler to understand, but stilting the language with scare quotes or writing unfocused prose with wild assumptions about what the average reader knows is not the way to do that.

Pronouncements of what I did and why? Isn't that what the discussion page is for? Discussion of what I did and why? I don't know anything about your past work on the article, and I dont' really care. I'm focused on making the current article better. I gave reasons for what I did, both in my edit comments, and in some cases here. You are welcome to discuss those, and explain why you happen to disagree with them, but if it's about why I'm a bad person, I could care less. I'm interested in improving the article.

Further, I didn't throw anything away. I made a number of edits that seemed warranted for this article, and offered a number of explanations along the way, which I see you haven't bothered to discuss before deciding on giving up. If you care to check, you will notice that the lead is noticeably longer now than it was prior to my edits, so I find it hard to accept that I just "threw out" your work. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 16:54, 20 May 2017 (UTC)

I have been gone for a week out of the country, and have only just now seen your revisions. I have no issues with your thinking that a different organization of topics makes more sense from a pedagogical standpoint. I disagree with you, but I accept the fact that Wikipedia is a collaborative effort among editors with diverse viewpoints. I will be making some changes, and we should come to consensus without too much problem. You are obviously well-intentioned and apparently knowledgeable about the subject. However, unlike the great majority of Wikipedia articles, THE TEXT AND FIGURES ARE TIGHTLY INTEGRATED. I am personally responsible for having drawn nearly 3/4 of the figures and animations currently gracing the article, and I carefully screened and and selected ALL BUT ONE of the additional illustrations from Commons. Maybe you should take a look at what the article looked like only a couple of months ago before I started to get involved: Spacetime. (version of 14:26, 15 March 2017) You can also read some Talk page comments about how awful the article was at the time: (Archived talk discussion from March 2017) The major issue was how basic and advanced topics were carelessly lumped together without rhyme or reason, making the article impossible to use as a reference by our main target audience. You have pulled material that I consider "advanced" into the early sections of the article, and you have also dragged material that most people would consider totally irrelevant to the very start of the article. (Pacha??? Clifford's ideas, which weren't even about spacetime, so far as I can ascertain??? Edgar Allen Poe's musings?)

I do not appreciate your not being careful about seeing that that text and figures should be as physically close together as practical, and I especially do not appreciate your NOT BOTHERING TO RENUMBER THEM in sequence. Wikipedia does not have a mechanism for automatically anchoring text and accompanying figures together. You have left me a lot of work. .

The sequencing was confusing. I went ahead and removed the numbering, so that should be less of a problem now. Hopefully, that saves you some work, although it only took me a couple of minutes. I'm not sure why that rose to the level of yelling. It is kind of disappointing that the figures aren't numbered automatically, like the citations are. That's what I would have expected. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 18:27, 25 May 2017 (UTC)

Asides from that, could you maybe adopt a username so that in the future we could know each other better? Although we seem to have started on a bit of an awkward note, there is no reason why we should continue to do so. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 11:58, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm sorry about the renumbering issue. I don't know anything about how that stuff works. But I worry about tight integration. In general, in the software world, coupling like that is considered a bad thing due to unintended consequences, as you seem to have experienced. If the Wiki software makes that a necessity, then we probably should shy away from those features.

In most Wikipedia articles, figures are decoration. In Spacetime, figures are an essential part of the presentation. Also, remember that nearly half of our users are accessing from mobile devices. Think of that what implies about trying to look up a figure that you are interested in. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 21:24, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I really like some of the figures that have been added.

Most of which I created. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 21:15, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Wow. You seem to think a lot of yourself.

You said it yourself. A few of the illustrations that I create are very nice. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 22:08, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

You are an illustration? I think I'm missing where you are going with this. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 00:02, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

Apparently you cannot parse a simple English sentence. I either drew with Inkscape or wrote computer programs to draw twenty of the article illustrations and animations. You wrote, "I really like some of the figures that have been added," without realizing, even though I stated so explicitly a few paragraphs above, that I was the person who added them. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 01:06, 23 May 2017 (UTC)

I said I liked the illustrations. And I said you must think a lot of yourself. I'm still not sure how they're connected, though, since one statement is about illustrations, and the other is about how you have presented yourself here. Tried to connect the two, and concluded you were an illustration. It's a leap, I know. Still puzzled by it. Your extra parsing isn't helping me understand how to connect those statements.

I wish I knew what software could be used to make that kind of stuff. I remember the old article. It sucked. Then something happened, and it got better.

I happened, that's what. And you're making it hard for me to proceed. Would you like to take over from here? I was planning to finish off the discussion of momentum and energy conservation, to discuss Bell's spaceship paradox, rapidity, and a discussion of four-vectors to round off flat spacetime. Then a section giving the prerequisite math for curved spacetime (super-basic intro to tensors) before an elementary mathematical presentation of curved spacetime. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 20:22, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I guess I should have just assumed that you owned the article from the start? Do I want you to "take over"? No, I want consensus improvements. I won't stand in your way for things that improve the article.

I don't own the article, but I can't work with somebody whose sense of proper article organization is so jumbled. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 22:08, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I don't know anything about Pacha, but I felt like the current location was the best landing place for the existing content. It's a bit strained, as is.

It doesn't belong anywhere near the beginning. 99% of Wikipedia users couldn't care less about that stuff. That's why I kept it in the Historical section after the main stuff that I was working on. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 20:22, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Don't know anything about what you're working on. But if there's somewhere it makes more sense, I'm not standing in your way. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 21:40, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Oh, yes, you are. You immediately reverted some minor changes that I made where I disagreed with your unnecessary tagging. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 22:08, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

I disagree with your characterization as unnecessary. I feel the article would benefit from a discussion of the things I've tagged. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 23:41, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Maybe a section on philosophy of spacetime is warranted? I think there are other articles about that on WP, and they could be good tie-ins. Clifford algebras are a mathematical idea. If there's an obvious tie-in to spacetime that doesn't involve bringing in special relativity, it's not clear to me. I didn't create any content on Clifford algebras, myself. Maybe it should be put in the special relativity section? One of the reasons for the rearrange was to make it clearer where the article was getting off-topic, and this may be one such example. Some trimming down might be in order?

No, I'm not getting a username. I've been here for years without one. Don't see why I need one now. How would it help? 47.32.217.164 (talk) 19:51, 22 May 2017 (UTC)

Four paragraph lead?

While a one-sentence lead may be a little thin, I'm not sure I understand why this article requires 4 paragraphs of lead before getting into the article itself. Three of the paragraphs that were recently added seem to simply be a recapitulation of the history already within the article. One question: why? The newly added paragraphs seem to be mostly about the historical development of the concept, so I'm not sure why the content isn't integrated in that section, instead. Especially as it is fairly redundant, I don't understand how this benefits the typical reader. Can we please trim this down a bit? 47.32.217.164 (talk) 07:36, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

I'm going to start removing text and placing it here, or integrating it with the history. Below is the first batch. This seems to be a summary of special relativity rather than spacetime, and has POV content such as "breakthrough advance" and "famous" and "extremely difficult", which isn't necessary to the article. I can't tell for sure if there's anything relevant to spacetime in there, so I'd say it's definitely not apparent to a novice. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 08:01, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

His theory was a breakthrough advance over Lorentz's 1904 theory of electromagnetic phenomena and Poincaré's electrodynamic theory. Although these theories included equations identical to those that Einstein introduced (i.e. the Lorentz transformation), they were essentially ad hoc models proposed to explain the results of various experiments—including the famous Michelson–Morley interferometer experiment—that were extremely difficult to fit into existing paradigms.

I'm extracting this sentence out, too. Seems to be a detail of the spacetime interval, not essential for a summary of spacetime. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 08:27, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

Although measurements of distance and time between events differ among observers, the spacetime interval is independent of the inertial frame of reference in which they are recorded.

Here's another detail of relativity that the lead can do without. This probably belongs in the section on relativity, if it's not there already. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 08:48, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

The speed of light has one definite value—a constant—that is independent of the motion of the light source.

All right! Reasonable stopping point for now. Down to two paragraphs. Not perfect. Still no real discussion of transformations, and the Einstein-Minkowski portions can still be tightened further, but I believe I've captured the thrust of the earlier text, and have taken out most of the digression and unnecessary detail. I feel it's much more readable now, and more focused on spacetime itself. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 09:21, 19 May 2017 (UTC)

See WP:MOSLEAD. For a big article on a broad subject, four paragraphs (perhaps even more) is necessary. YohanN7 (talk) 10:16, 26 May 2017 (UTC)

Ok, I read that. It says nothing about necessity of four paragraphs, and seems to suggest that four is the upper end. Right now there are two, which seem to be doing a so-so job. It's definitely not perfect, but I think it's far better than the rambling and peacocking that it was before. Suggestions welcome. 47.32.217.164 (talk) 23:41, 26 May 2017 (UTC)