User talk:Edguy99

Please feel free to leave any comments you have that would be of interest by editing this discussion page.Edguy99 (talk) 20:55, 12 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Concerns about User:Edguy99/Nuclear Physics and User:Edguy99/Matter and Energy

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia!

I hope not to seem unfriendly or make you feel unwelcome, but I noticed your user subpage User:Edguy99/Nuclear Physics and User:Edguy99/Matter and Energy, and I am concerned that they might not meet Wikipedia's user page guideline. After you look over that guideline, could we discuss that concern here? I'd appreciate hearing your views, such as your reasons for wanting this particular page and any alternatives you might accept.

There are several options available for resolving this matter:

If you can relieve my concerns through discussing it here, I can stop worrying about it.
If you decide to delete the page yourself, please add {{Db-userreq}} to the top of the page in question and an administrator will delete it.
If the two of us can't agree on what needs to be done, we can ask for help through Wikipedia's user pages for discussion, which may result in the page in question being deleted.

Thank you. Pieter Kuiper (talk) 07:30, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, it looks like he's using his user page for self promotion rather than as a user page. The chemistry stuff looks okay as science (at first glance, at least), but the nuclear physics is fringe, to be polite. kwami (talk) 08:44, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for the feedback. I would appreciate some time to remove the files as the graphics are hard to reproduce. I have started an animatedphysics at sites.google and it will take me some time to convert as much of the editing is different and most of the layout I will have to redo.Edguy99 (talk) 17:29, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your positive response. As I wrote at commons:User talk:Edguy99#Questionable visualisations, my concern is primarily with your nuclear models, and they are not animations. Your animations are mostly about chemical bonding. I do not think those sequences represent what present-day chemists have in their heads, but it might be close to the thinking in the cubic-atom picture. So I appreciate the effort, and I do not propose to delete them from commons, just to move to their own categories. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 19:08, 29 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. Regarding the physics, I would appreciate your feedback on a couple of thoughts Edguy99 (talk) 19:58, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Consider a pretty standard picture of the water molecule done with space filling software Water molecule. It is a powerful representation because it conveys a couple of things very well (there are 2 hydrogen, 1 oxygen, seem to take about that amount of space, oxygen is a bit bigger, there seems to be a certain amount of overlapping going on) - the overlapping shell is important to me in the visual representation as it suggest that hydrogen and oxygen although represented as being very large (53picometers radius for Hydrogen), do not actually crash into each other at this distance, but seem to interact. (from experment 1-2femtometers distance for a crash, I think).

This picture can be extended by trying to represent the electrons. People agree, I think, that at least the valance electrons are in some way associated with the bonding. (Ie, if you knock out these electrons, the bond falls apart). We dont really "see" exactly where they are, but we can tell "generally" where they have an influence hence the Lewis dot structure and other types of pictures may be useful where electrons are tossed in "about" where you think they have an influence to help represent visually the bonding of hydrogen and oxygen.

Moving to the Hydrogen and Oxygen. An important issue to convey in a visual representation of the nucleus is the allowed ratios of protons and neutrons. For instance, you could never have 2 protons without a neutron (stable over time, I mean). Continuing the representation as shells works very well if you layer the shells with the rule that you must have a neutron shell seperating each proton shell (call it an insulator). This provides a very neat pictorial representation of all the elements. If you also allow that certain numbers of extra neutron shells can be added in, you have all of the allowed element nucleus isotopes pictorially represented. The strong force, pictorially, can now be represented as the amount of force required to seperate the shells or energy released by combining them.

The shell layers represent a place we can pictorially represent even more information about the nucleus. If I add structure to the picture of the shell by saying inside the nucleus the shell can form 3 layers and ammend the insulator rule to be a layer rather then a shell, we get a visual representation of the quarks involved here. Up (+2/3) and Down (-1/3) are given different colors and you always have a jump of +/-1 between the quarks inside the nucleus. Now the weak force can be represented as a change (and the resulting change cascade) in the color of the quarks. Edguy99/Nuclear_Physics

To me, this is simply a different way (one of many) of representing information. To use the chemistry shell representation of a hydrogen nucleus for physics does look a little different but does lead to some interesting thoughts. I would be appreciate any comments you would have or if you see an inconsistency with the physics.

It is not obvious that two protons could not form a bound state, because the attractive nuclear force between protons is very strong at nuclear distances. But I won't try to explain nuclear physics - I have not done any work in that area. Read a good introductory book. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 22:13, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You are correct, but it is pretty short lived "Helium-2 (two protons, no neutrons) is a radioisotope that decays by proton emission into protium, with a half-life of 3x10−27 seconds."[57]Edguy99 (talk) 22:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

You have asked "your reasons for wanting this particular page and any alternatives you might accept". I have found wiki to be a very fine place to find, store and share information. In the process of storing and sharing information, I appear to have made some errors regarding storing of information. I am interested in resolving this in the easiest way possible. You mention alternatives, is there another place these files can be put? Can I keep my user page? Edguy99 (talk) 22:51, 30 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Wikipedia user pages are not private storage space. For images there are many free places, like for example Flickr. For your text pages, free web hosting does exist, but often after some time the service will put commercials on your page. There may also be blog sites that are suitable. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 17:07, 31 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

PS: Or google; see for example http://sites.google.com/site/unitfreak/ /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 18:16, 31 March 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Hello Edguy. A couple of months ago I came across another user's subpage which contained some material which I thought potentially interesting and useful, but full of mistakes (link errors to be precise). So I wrote to him on his talk page and explained. He replied politely enough, but making it clear that he did not welcome my intrusion, so I quit, taking the view that it was his user space, so not my concern.

Looking now at your case, we can ask:

Is your stuff offensive in any way? Answer No.

Is your stuff technically accurate? It doesn't matter. Note that WP:UP#Ownership and editing of pages in the user space includes the sentence "Article content policies such as WP:OR generally do not (apply)"

Is your stuff an abuse of wikipedia's hospitality? I would argue that in its current form the answer is No. If it was developed into something much longer, or advertised to the general public, I would revise my view on that, but in any case its technical accuracy would be irrelevant to that judgement.

So I am suggesting that, while I applaud your calm and polite response to your critics, above, you can actually afford to be a bit more robust with them. Remarks like "the nuclear physics is fringe, to be polite", "my concern is primarily with your nuclear models" and "I do not think those sequences represent what present-day chemists have in their heads" are totally irrelevant. It's your space, and, within wide limits, you can record whatever you want.

The reason I find this important is the precedent that may be set. We have enough trouble with the interpretation of WP:NPOV and WP:RS in articles. It would be a severe retrograde step if this issue was extended to user space. SamuelTheGhost (talk) 12:07, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@SamuelTheGhost: It would be retrograde step to allow user pages to become a safe refuge with immunity from scrutiny for all kinds of material that would never be considered factual or notable in the article name space, for articles that were deleted, for private blogging, etcetera. If someone wants his stuff to be left alone, there are other hosting services.

I'm not proposing a retrograde step, or any step at all. I'm reasserting existing wikipedia policy and practice, which is to allow very wide latitude to what editors put on their own user pages. If you want an interesting case for comparison, how about Wikisource:User:ScienceApologist/Optics workshop? Do you think that's acceptable use of wikisource? SamuelTheGhost (talk) 14:56, 7 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

@Edguy99: I left a note on commons:user talk:Edguy99#Your user page that your user page there is outside project scope. On commons, there is a clear policy that user pages are not to be filled with encyclopedia-style articles. /Pieter Kuiper (talk) 20:54, 3 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]

See also my comments at User talk:ScienceApologist#Strange nuclear physics on user subpages, and see WP:User page. Another website you might want to use is www.yourwiki.net.

The following is according to my own understanding of the subject and may contain errors. When oxygen and hydrogen are represented as big balls that touch or overlap like that, most of the volume of the ball is actually roughly representing the electron orbitals. The nucleus is just a very tiny thing in the middle of the ball. So it doesn't make much sense to also separately represent the electrons as dots. The electrons are not in very specific places but are clouds of probability density. Similarly for shells within the nucleus: the shells may overlap. Two shells for the same particle type may have limits on how much they can overlap, due to the Pauli exclusion principle, but shells for two different types (proton and neutron) can fully overlap with no problem, so it doesn't make much sense to talk about a neutron shell being between two proton shells. They can coexist in the same space, although the shells for the different particle types may not be of the same size; and a shell doesn't have definite boundaries, but probability levels that taper off gradually as you go further away, like the Earth's atmosphere gradually tapering off as you go into space. You might want to read some of the Wikipedia articles (and associated references/further reading) such as quantum mechanics, shell model Electron configuration etc.

Your skills at making images could be very useful. If you're so inspired, you might want to help at Category:Wikipedia requested images or the corresponding page at Commons. ☺Coppertwig (talk) 18:21, 1 April 2009 (UTC)[reply]