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The following is an archived discussion of a featured article nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The article was not promoted 04:34, 30 March 2007. You may be looking for what was at Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Atomic theory/archive2, see Talk:Atomic theory/FAC archive sort

Atomic theory

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Object. This article has some shortcomings content-wise and source-wise.--ragesoss 17:23, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • This is an article on the history of atomic theories, but it draws almost exclusively on primary sources and websites of dubious authority with respect to the topic (ISCID, Encarta, etc.). There are many good histories of physics and chemistry that could be used for this article; Quantum Generations by Kragh is a good general source for the late-nineteenth and 20th-century portions of the story, and there are a number of histories of chemistry that would be relevant.
  • There is no mention of the many intermediate theories between what is described in the "Birth" section and J.J. Thomson. The vortex-based ether theories and other 19th century ideas are an important part of the web of ideas from which modern atomic theory arose. There is, for example, no mention of either James Clerk Maxwell or Ludwig Boltzmann.
    • I found no mention of intermediate theories in my research. I deliberately omitted obsolete theories from the Modern Atomic Theory part, unless a said theory was a vital stepping stone to another. Otherwise, this article would become too large, and the dead ends would distract readers from the core chain of discoveries that led to our current understanding of the atom. For instance, Gilbert N Lewis once proposed that atoms were shaped like cubes, in an attempt to explain chemical bonding. This was discarded when Schroedinger came along with his waveform model which was not built upon the Lewis model.Kurzon 07:09, 27 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
      • As I mentioned above, there are history of physics sources that deal with these issues. It is not legitimate in a historical article to omit "obsolete theories", especially when the the line between an obsolete theory and a precursor that has some retained elements is so fuzzy. It is more a gradual evolution of theories than a simple case of some wrong dead ends being omitted. I strongly suggest that you consult Quantum Generations as well as Intellectual Mastery of Nature: Theoretical Physics from Ohm to Einstein, volume 2 by Jungnickel and McCormmach. There's also a good atomic theory bibliography here: [1] --ragesoss 04:08, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]
  • There is no adequate transition between the "philosophical atomism" section and what presumably is the contrasting birth of scientific atomism. Much more relevant to the topic than Indian, Greek, or Islamic atomism was the assortment of Renaissance and early-modern atomic theories.

Weak object The tone does not always seem suitable. The comment that the Greeks would think graphite and diamonds composed of carbon, for instance, sounds very informal. The significiance of Einstein's work is also not made clear: it was the first evidence that atoms were actual physical objects of determinate size, rather than infinitely small theoretical models. Goldfritha 21:40, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

  • Comments
    • "antiquated beliefs .. arbitrarily small quantity." contradicts the next sentence "Atomic theory began thousands of years"
    • Indian philosophy section needs more specific references.--ppm 22:02, 25 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose - I am surprised to see so many comments in the previous FACs saying 'not enough refs' and few dealing with the problems the article has. It is far short of FA standards. My problems with its current version are:

  • Atomism - needs a paragraph or two discussing atomism as a concept rather than starting straight off with the Indian philosophy. I would like to see this section much more heavily cited. The section on the Greeks cannot continue to rely on Encarta, which is not a reliable source. Furthermore there were more Greek atomists than Democritus and Leucippus
  • The article doesn't cover anything from the 11th to the 19th century. How did the early atomic philosophy affect the later atomic hypothesis in science? Did medieval alchemists and renaissance scientists put the atomic hypothesis entirely from their minds? Were any theories developed in the missing period influenced by the idea of atoms (e.g. Newton's corpuscular theory of light?)
  • You should remove the 'Modern Atomic Theory' section and make each subsection a section in its own right.
  • Birth: Why are Brown's and Einstein's contribution to Brownian motion relevant, given that Dalton and Avogadro's work?
  • How quickly was the atomic hypothesis adopted; did it immediately gain acceptance or did it face opposition for ages?
  • I would put the discovery of nucleus and electrons into one section.
  • Isotopes: Why are they relevant to atomic theory? And the account of their discovery is not the same as that given in isotope.
  • I would make 'Quantum models of the atom' a section of its own. I think you need to give the reader an idea of the state of atomic theory today, even if it is largely unchanged since the 1920s. You also need to talk about applications of atomic theory and other theories derived from it (nuclear fission, quantum electrodynamics, etc).
  • The number of original papers in the references is a strong point of the article. However I would prefer to see some non-technical references - e.g. authoritative textbooks or popular science - included as well.
    • This is an explicitly historical article, and there is plenty of history that has been written. The number of original papers is a flaw, in my view, bordering on original research. There have been probably thousands of papers on atomic theory, and it is not self-evident which are the most significant.--ragesoss 04:08, 29 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Regards, The Land 17:23, 28 March 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured article candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.
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