User talk:Marc Goossens

On refs and citations

{{helpme}}

Harvard style in-line citations are much more readable than footnotes, but seem to lack the reverse link (from ref or note to cite in the text). Or is there a way to get the best of both worlds?

As an alternative, can I make the combination of Wikipedia:Citing_sources#Short_footnote_citations_with_full_references work with the structured citation templates?

Thanks! --Marc Goossens (talk) 13:47, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

There should be a little blue, upwards pointing arrow on the left side of each citation--Phoenix-wiki ^{talk · contribs} 20:04, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

{{helpme}} OK, sure, works perfectly with footnotes. Question was: can I get something equivalent with Harvard style refs instead of footnotes? Many thanks for bearing with me. --Marc Goossens (talk) 09:18, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Hi Marc. I often monitor the helpme category, but usually only answer questions where I'm confident of my answer. But since your question seems to be languishing, I'm going to give it a stab. What I think you are looking for is the use of {{Ref harvard}} in combination with {{Note label}} (please see Wikipedia:Footnote3 for some material on this). I'm going to use it at the end of this sentence following my signature as a working example for you and hope it fits the bill.--Fuhghettaboutit (talk) 12:00, 22 December 2007 (UTC){{ref harvard|BBC-a|BBC 2006|a}}

References

• ^a BBC. "Name of title". bbc.co.uk. Retrieved 2007-12-21. {{cite web}}: Check |url= value (help)

Hello, and thanks for your post on my talk page

Hi! I just saw your post on my talk page and haven't even finished reading it yet. I hadn't checked it in quite a while and wanted to let you know I appreciate your help.

I have spent the last few months trying, among other things, to work out the precise difference between semantics and everything else. I've got a copy of Tarski on "the semantic concept of truth" (or maybe it's "semantical conception" or something?) but not much else, as most resources tend to read like the article on Wikipedia on semantics, which says that it "refers to the aspects of meaning that are expressed in a language, code, or other form of representation" and "is contrasted with two other aspects of meaningful expression, namely, syntax, the construction of complex signs from simpler signs, and pragmatics, the practical use of signs by agents or communities of interpretation in particular circumstances and contexts".

My problem is that I see such things as "representation" and "meaning" as rather useless insofar as their effects cannot be determined by experiment. If someone says "this represents that", it's like saying "this may be interchanged with that in some way", usually, and likewise with "this means that" (at least generally), but one only knows what one means oneself or what something represents to oneself, unless another person tells what something means or represents to himself or herself. But if semantics can only be defined in these terms, how can I test whether something is "just semantics" or not? Syntax, which is often contrasted with semantics, seems to me to be reductible to it (or vice versa).

In other words: if semantics "is contrasted with" such other aspects of "meaningful expression" as "syntax", then syntax, being an aspect of meaningful expression, is an object of study within the "field" of semantics, right? If semantics is, along with other things, "the study of meaning", but is only contrasted with everything other than semantics, then what else should I conclude?

If you know of any "original" sources on semantics (first uses of the term in English, first distinctions made between semantical and syntactical arguments (if that's even correct English), etc.), or, better still, of a formal or axiomatic definition of it commonly used within mathematical and/or scientific discussion, or, best yet, of a criterion which always distinguishes between semantics and everything else, this would be greatly helpful.

Sorry for the quasi-rant-- as I said, I haven't even read most of your post yet-- but, again, I've been trying to figure this out for quite a while and can't seem to get it. I'll probably post more later regarding the actual content of your post :) and I hope you'll find the time to answer the questions it will probably raise in my mind. I'm really not being rhetorical about my confusion about semantics; I've consulted several people and generally been told I'm making semantic arguments, but honestly don't see much difference between them and arguments of any other type other than that they are dubbed semantical by other people. Thanks for your patience if you can help me with this at all.

"[E]verything is but a purely formal game" in mathematics: isn't precisely what a purely formal game is something that can only be settled by semantic argument? (Or is it? Do you see my problem?) I've yet to tackle any interesting problems in mathematics, since I know full well that I don't understand its foundations, although I'd like to do things like prove that the Mandelbrot set is or isn't pathwise-connected. (I do finally have a couple of books on topology, at least...) I understand that mathematics can be a tool that allows people to do things, like predict events in the world or make fractals, which I would like to be able to do myself. But I need a really, really formal introduction or set of definitions in order to get started. Maybe categories would be better than sets for me-- I already understand naive set theory, first-order logic, etc., and would like to see a formalism without so much internal dispute as set theory (in which one may employ a theory with urelements, or ZFC, or any of a host of other things). Can you give me a reference (or a few) to freely-available information on category theory? A friend has already recommended that I study category theory, universal algebra, and topoi, and I'm trying to get there, but a text that started at the beginning would be helpful.

Tastyummy 10:03, 24 April 2007 (UTC)

Hi--long time no talk. Sorry about all this delay. I have started an attempt towards a reply to your comments above in a corresponding section of my user pages: User:Marc Goossens/Reply to Tastyummy. Apart from its being preliminary and incomplete rant too, it's probably not much use to you anyway, I'm afraid. --Marc Goossens (talk) 14:59, 16 December 2007 (UTC)

Continuum thermomechanics

What is this, I've never heard of this term before. Is there a book that uses this term? --Sadi Carnot 16:19, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Sadi: sure, I didn't make it up. It goes back to the modern reformulation of thermodynamics in the 1950's by Truesdell and Toupin (in the part on classical field theory of Flügge's classic Handbuch der Physik). This approach makes thermodynamics into a real dynamics (with time as explicit parameter) and lifts it to the level of continuum mechanics, so that it can deal with combined thermal and mechanical processes (flows, deformations, ...), even in inhomogeneous bodies (possibly mixtures undergoing chemical reactions, or materials exhibiting memory-effects, say like hysteresis). This extends the scope of thermodynamics to viscous, visco-eleastic, hypo- and hyper-elastic media etc. A recent book is

Continuum Thermomechanics

Series: Progress in Mathematical Physics , Vol. 43 /

Bermúdez de Castro, Alfredo / 2005, ISBN-10: 3-7643-7265-6

You will also find countless references in articles published over the years in Archive for Rational Mechanics and Analysis; you may further want to check Truesdell's classic on Rational Thermodynamics. Googling for "continuum thermomechanics" may also help. Other names in the field are Walter Noll (who pioneered the use of measure theory both in continuum mechanics as well as continuum thermodynamics), Bernard Coleman, Morton Gurtin, Ingo Müller and many others. Does this help? Of course I should wish to complete any possible contribution with relevant references in due course. --Marc Goossens 20:03, 5 November 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, I'll keep this info in mind. Also, I see you have article Morton Gurtin listed in "category:thermodynamicists". Could you clean this up a bit, e.g. add a birth date, summarize the person in the first paragraph, etc., see any of the other thermodynamicists to use as a model. Later: --Sadi Carnot 20:56, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Good suggestion. Obviously I have been looking for such information, but unfortunately was unable to obtain it so far. I keep trying. Remarkably, birth dates are easier to find for dead scientists...? --Marc Goossens 18:15, 24 November 2006 (UTC)

Definitions

Hi, could you please define (with references):

• Continuum thermomechanics -
• Continuum thermodynamics -

Thanks, --Sadi Carnot 21:06, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Belgian politics article IJzerwake,

You may consider using Webcite to archive the news articles in question and reference them that way. feel free to ask me more questions.--Work permit (talk) 06:26, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

Great. Many thanks! --Marc Goossens (talk) 07:06, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

you or anyone gets to decide (that's the great thing about wikipedia). You can leave a comment on the talk page (like I added references), and remove the tag.--Work permit (talk) 17:37, 26 August 2008 (UTC)

I've removed the tag for you. I've also edited the ciations. You usually want to include the title of the article, the source, the author (if you have it) and the date. Look at the first two citations I edited, and feel free to edit the rest. As you can imagine, my flemish is not very good :)

Unreferenced BLPs

Hello Marc Goossens! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created is tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current 288 article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the {{unreferencedBLP}} tag. Here is the article:

1. Morton Gurtin - Find sources: Google (books · news · scholar · free images · WP refs) · FENS · JSTOR · TWL

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 05:00, 15 January 2010 (UTC)

Notification: changes to "Mark my edits as minor by default" preference

Hello there. This is an automated message to tell you about the gradual phasing out of the preference entitled "Mark all edits minor by default", which you currently have (or very recently had) enabled.

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Thank you for your understanding and happy editing :) Editing on behalf of User:Jarry1250, LivingBot (talk) 19:35, 14 March 2011 (UTC)

Avoiding Cite error in nested reference

See my draft contribution User:Marc Goossens/Schröter-Schelb Spacetime

I want to substantiate the claim made in Note 3 by adding a (nested) reference. The reference is correctly numbered and shown but throws a Cite error. How can this be avoided? I've seen there are bugs related to nested tags. Is there no way around?

TIA for any help and suggestions.

Marc Goossens (talk) 19:02, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok, I think I have fixed the page to do what you want it to. I don't fully understand why moving the note, complete with your ref syntax, to be in text, rather then defined in the note section helped, but it appears to have. Some members of the en-help channel on IRC were able to point out a page where it was working, and that's how the page was constructed. Anyway, let me know if that is not what you were going for, and good luck with your editing. Monty₈₄₅ 22:56, 1 May 2011 (UTC)

Reasoning about Space-Time

Hi Marc, I've just seen you large list of personal articles on Space-Time. I'll need some time though to run through all of it, yet what I've seen was already extremely helpful. It appears as if we have similar interest, though I'm using a BLOG for my stuff (where I try to find answers ...). If you like, just drop by: in BLOG: http://petri-grt.blogspot.com/ in FB: https://www.facebook.com/groups/275557099147507/ Yours Corneli{o}[us] --Corneliusni (talk) 18:49, 15 January 2012 (UTC)

Hilbert's Sixth problem: very focussed view

Hilbert's Sixth problem need not be seen as the search for the theory of everything *if* future developments in Physics do not throw up new axiomatic difficulties. I believe that they will not, and that therefore Hilbert's Sixth problem is solved and opens up new topics of great mathematical interest.

Previous Work

The bulk of the work was done by Darwin and Fowler who were, as Khintchine acknowledges, the first to present a logically clear version of Classical Statistical Mechanics in its relation to Classical Mechanics. They also treated the Quantum Case, and Schroedinger later showed that their Bohr-style treatment in terms of energy levels could be extended without any difficulty to the Heisenberg-Schroedinger style of Quantum Mechanics.

Quantum MEchanics was axiomatised by Weyl (with the help of Schroedinger and Debye) and, independently, Dirac. The main point is the selection of axioms and the formulation of definitions. However, Wigner pointed out, and taught von Neumann to see this, that these axioms were very unsatisfactory because of what Wigner called their «duality», i.e., the interaction of a particle with a measuring apparatus falls under the axioms in two very different ways: as a joint system, there is a joint wavefunction and the result is an entangled system with a deterministic, unitary evolution. But when treated as a Quantum system interacting with a logically ill-defined (because it is a primitive notion in Weyl and Dirac) «measurement apparatus», it is not entangled and it is a stochastic process.

I do not believe that Quantum Field Theory introduces any fundamental difficulties compared to this one, so I believe that fixing the problem Wigner analysed---later perspicuously analysed by John Bell---is the only remaining part of HIlbert's Sixth problem.

Khintchine unfairly ran-down the achievment of Darwin and Fowler by making unjustified, subjective, criticisms of their proofs which, althouth he conceded they were valid, he claimed they lacked perspicuity. I wonder if this was a kind of Stalinism, or a kind of normal competitive urge to puff up one's own contribution: Khintchine showed that the propositions of Darwin and Fowler were naturally probabiistic in nature and could be proved by means of a refinement of the usual limit theorems in probability theory. But from the standpoint of Hilbert, what is hard is not the proofs, it is the selection of the concepts, the selection of the axioms, and the formulation of definitions which is hard. Even physicists know what a proof is, but they rarely know what a definition is (Lucien Hardy, Dirac, Goldstone, Allahverdyan et al. absolutely are clueless in this respect.) John Bell did, as did Wigner.

Khintchine made a very great contribution to the subject by conjecturing that the real content of Statistical Mechanics could be proved in general for any system with sufficiently many degrees n of freedom (and the same, or only a few, «types» of components, weakly coupled): the observables of physical interest would behave as if they were ergodic, even though the system was nowhere near ergodic. Khintchine died in prison before he could make much progress, and I wonder if this is why he could not found a school to follow up his ideas. Ruelle and Lanford III made a little progress, but not much. This visionary conjecture is worth more than all of his theorems, in my opinion, and his theorems are worth a great deal indeed. Even engineers learn his theorems... you know, the one where he unfairly ran down Wiener's previous work on the subject by failing to provide a reference to Wiener at all....

It has not been realised that Khintchine's conjectures are the key to resolving Wigner's difficulty. One reason for this is that it has not been realised that getting a clear-cut definition of «probability» within an axiomatic system of Physics would be key for this problem. That such a definition was lacking was widely realised by mathematicians, such as Littlewood and Kolmogoroff, but that its solution would be relevant to Wigner's analysis was a surprise to me, although in hindsight it should not have been.

Prof. Jan von Plato of Helsinki University was the first to achieve a clearcut definition of «physical probability» but only in the special case of a classical mechanical, i.e., deterministic, ergodic system. Now, very few systems are known to be ergodic, and especially Quantum systems are linear and so are very far from being ergodic. So he could not see how to extend his results to the Quantum case.

The definition of probability

Although I had a quantum example, (published in Quantum Theory and Symmetries III, Cincinnati 2003, Argyres et al. eds., see http://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9789812702340_0017?prevSearch=Johnson+Entanglement&searchHistoryKey= , also http://arxiv.org/abs/quant-ph/0507017 , I could not formulate a general definition until recently. After proving Khintchine's conjectures for a new, and very wide, class of systems: all linear systems---I finally saw how to formulate a general definition.

My paper, « Descriptive Statistics as a new foundation for probability theory: part of Hilbert's Sixth Problem » was just accepted for publication in the Revista Investigaciones Operacionales (run by the statistics and OR dept. at Havana Univ.).

Although the paper and title are more modest, in my opinion this is the only part of Hilbert's Sixth problem that remained to be solved, so there it is. It turns out that probability is not a new primitive concept, neither is *measuring apparatus*, both can be defined in terms of other more fundamental concepts of Physics. Wave function, state, system, space, time, energy, are primitive. The measurement axioms are only approximations, and the concept of probability only becomes exactly applicable in the limit of an infinite number of degrees of freedom and Planck's constant's vanishing, but one can say exactly how good the approximation is, in terms of physically measureable quantities, for any finite value of n and h, which answers Littlewood's complaints about the usual frequency theory. Defining a new kind of thermodynamic limit answers Littlewood's challenge «... either you mean the ordinary limit, or you else you have the problem of explaining how ″limit″ behaves... You do not make an illegitimate conception legitimate by putting it into inverted commas.»

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Thanks for promoting the Meta-Theory of Physics to the public! Martin Ziegler (talk) 20:26, 13 January 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Great work! Martin Ziegler (talk) 16:06, 6 November 2014 (UTC)

A barnstar for you!

	The Original Barnstar
	Great work! Martin Ziegler (talk) 16:06, 6 November 2014 (UTC)