User talk:StillFascinated

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Hello, StillFascinated, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions.

I notice that one of the first articles you edited appears to be dealing with a topic with which you may have a conflict of interest. In other words, you may find it difficult to write about that topic in a neutral and objective way, because you are, work for, or represent, the subject of that article. Your recent contributions may have already been undone for this very reason.

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your messages on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Wikipedia:Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place {{help me}} before the question. Again, welcome! Sanpitch (talk) 06:48, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Entropic Gravity

Hey, it looks like all your edits are in relation to Entropic gravity. Please remember that Wikipedia does not allow original research; even though it appears that you know the material, you need to essentially provide a citation for everything that you write. You can not treat this as a quick conference paper without sources or a lecture to an uneducated friend. Sanpitch (talk) 06:57, 10 February 2013 (UTC)

Sanpitch, my only conflict is with the quality of the article. I am neither in favor, nor in opposition to the topic. I am not even working in the fields of general relativity or theoretical high energy physics. I am, however, an experimental physicist who can tell when a physics argument that appeals to experiments is fundamentally flawed. Kobakhidze's criticism of entropic gravity based on "experiments" is pure nonsense, at a level that I would expect even a good high school physics teacher to recognize.

I do have to read up on the correct way to edit articles... and I haven't quite figured out the signing etc., either. Let me get up to speed on that.

With regards to the criticism section, given the necessary limitations of encyclopedic writing, I would probably go minimalist, bluntly rejecting bad physics references and go with what little seems to have hand and foot. How about replacing all of what's there now with something like:

"Entropic gravity, as proposed by Verlinde in his original article, reproduces Einstein's equations and, in a Newtonian approximation, Newton's 1/r potential for gravitational forces. Since it does not make new physical predictions, it can not be falsified with existing experimental methods, at this time, any more than Newtonian gravity and general relativity."

as the beginning of the criticism section.

The first sentence, I believe, is trivial. The second part, however, is an argument for which I couldn't find suitable quotes in a physics publication, so far. I would even go so far as to it being too trivial for publication, even though it would still be part of the discourse between physicists who are talking seriously about the concept. I have very little doubt that most physicists would accept the conclusion that, at this time, one should treat entropic gravity as experimentally unfalsifiable, although, of course, there are Planck scale physics experiments, like Fermilab's Holometer, which could possibly shed light on the matter, by comparing Planck "noise" spectra predictions that may differ between stochastic and quantum mechanical models of gravity at that scale... but those are future experiments, and some of the theoretical concepts applied in them seem just as shaky as the assumptions on which entropic gravity is built (if not more so?).

Now, once one has motivated why entropic gravity is not up for experimental grabs, one could follow up with

"Even so, entropic gravity in its current form has been severely challenged on formal grounds. Matt Visser in ... has shown that the attempt to model conservative forces in the general Newtonian case, i.e. for arbitrary potentials and an unlimited number of discrete masses, with an entropic force formalism, leads to unphysical requirements for the required entropy and involves an unnatural number of temperature baths of differing temperature."

And then I would quote the article of Tower Wang and write:

"In ... Tower Wang shows that the inclusion of energy-momentum conservation and cosmological arguments severely restricts a wide class of potential modifications of entropic gravity, some of which have been used to generalize entropic gravity beyond the singular case of an entropic model of Einstein's equations. He concludes "As indicated by our results, the modified entropic gravity models of form (2), if not killed, should live in a very narrow room to assure the energy-momentum conservation and to accommodate a homogeneous isotropic universe."."

And this is probably all I would put into the criticism section, for now. Then the remaining question is whether one should say anything about the question of experimental falsification, at all, or simply ignore it for the purposes of this article?

Any thoughts on replacing everything that is in the criticism section right now with these few sentences?

Yes, the paragraphs that you suggest sound much better than the current paragraphs. I suggest that you replace the current content with your suggested paragraphs, along with some content on Talk:Entropic gravity. I would not put any more than your basic paragraphs; I think it is good to be simple, especially in an encyclopedia intended for the non-expert. It looks like you've planned some references as well. I suggest that you return to the page occasionally to see how your edits are received.

As for the signature, you can just place four tildes (~~~~) at the end of any content that you write on a talk page to produce an automatic signature. The signature at the end of this paragraph was produced in exactly this way. Good luck! Sanpitch (talk) 07:35, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi Sanpitch. Glad you like the short version. I do to. I'll replace the current text and add the correct references to Visser and Wang. I will also leave a note in the talk page why the text was replaced. Thanks for all your help and all the work that you and the other Wikipedia editors are doing! It's a great resource and I love using it. StillFascinated (talk) 23:22, 14 February 2013 (UTC)

I left a few comments for you at the bottom of the Entropic Gravity talk page. I also moved your explanation to the bottom of the talk page in its own section. Sanpitch (talk) 07:38, 16 February 2013 (UTC)