User talk:Drac2000

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Contents 1 Prod at Sharon Weinberger 2 New Concerns 3 Sorry 4 New cats

[edit] Prod at Sharon Weinberger

Please don't continually replace the prod tag on the article. Once there is a dispute; the nomination should be made at AFD per WP:DP. If you need any help creating an entry there, please let me know and I'd be happy to help you out. Kuru ^talk 00:42, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Thanks Kuru. It does seem to be controversial. When I started I thought since there was no reason for the page to be in Wikipedia, it would be uncontested. Turns out to be quite the opposite. So, here we go with the AFD process as recommended. --Drac2000 00:58, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

Not a problem - since there is another editor who is keen on prodding and re-prodding; I've gone ahead and created the AFD; please add your analysis at Wikipedia:Articles_for_deletion/Sharon_Weinberger. I have not had the time to look at all the data, so I posted it neutral. Thanks for your attention to this. Kuru ^talk 01:03, 22 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New Concerns

Disinformation as a topic. --Drac2000 17:14, 23 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Sorry

Sorry, perhaps I struck the wrong tone at the IGE article; no slight of recent efforts was intended. linas 03:10, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Linas, thanks for you kind comment. I found your constructive criticism over at the Induced gamma emission talk page to be extremely helpful. Please continue to share your talent and expretise and we will achieve something that is a credit to Wikipedia. As I said my background is more with laser concepts and for me that makes these interdisciplinary efforts particularly exciting. I will address your insights and thoughtful comments over on the discussion page next. Just wanted to convey my personal thanks here first thing today.

Regards, --Drac2000 14:44, 1 September 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, and you've done a fine job on the article so far. The reason for the controversy can be better understood once you've seen some typical bad-behaviour patterns. -- We have "true believers" who document perpetual motion machines (category:perpetual motion machines) as if they really really worked; edit wars start when someone comes to insert a sentence to the effect: "this won't ever work". We have people who have proven Einstein to be wrong .. Sheesh. They get quickly deleted, but not without a fight. Theories of UFO propulsion ... Category:Pseudophysics. On the medical side, we have intense arguments about the true dangers of environmental pollutants, and about whether some hopeful but untested cure works -- even the efficacy of vitamins is contested. Many of the "problem editors" have a poor background in science -- but not always. There have been a few quite legit academics, who have made quite outrageous statements; in one case the person, though actually quite well-respected for their early work, was banned after more than half a year of abusive editing. Far too often, we have rational, well-balanced editors who have no expertise in a field trying to keep the kooks at bay: so even for the well-meaning editor, it becomes difficult to tell truth from fiction. It is this last case that seems to apply to IGE. There does not currently seem to be an ongoing controversy there, but you can certainly see the fallout. linas 15:01, 2 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] New cats

Rather than creating a new cat, e.g. Category:Nuclear interdisciplinary topics, its usually a better idea to put an article into multiple categories. SO IGE should probably be in Category:Directed-energy weapons, Category:Quantum optics and so on. There's no harm in having lots of cats, it makes the article more visible. Presuming, that is, you want it to be more visible. linas 06:09, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

Hi Linas, nice to be in discussions again. As always, you are able to illuminate the core of the problem. I agree completely that multiple categories is preferable to new categories. However, I do feel that the weaponization of the IGE topic was regrettable and still tends to intimidate consideration of a very interesting interdisciplinary topic. There is not a category of isomers, but anyway isomers are excited state isotopes so how would you see the two categories of "isotopes" and "quantum optics"? If you find merit in that approach, would you please make the change and erase the category that I had added? I am not sure that I could do such linked actions and I would like to see how it is done. Thanks for the improvement.

--Drac2000 14:40, 9 December 2006 (UTC)

There aren't always suitable categories; these may arrive later. After some given cat grows to more than 50-100 articles in it, it becomes easy to spot a pattern, and to split that cat up into something more refined. As long as an article is in the appropriate general cats, it will end up in the appropriate subcats if and when these are created.

To delete a cat, you empty out all the articles, and put {{delete}} in there. An admin will come by to delete it. It looks better when the original creator asks for deletion.

As to weaponization ... I'm not sure what you refer to. If you think some young scientist will read the WP article and say to themselves, "wow, this is an interesting research area, I think I'll go into it", that seems unlikely, ... but, well, I suppose it could happen. But the weaponization seems unavoidable, and chilling. Even a small amount of reading about will bring to light the past disputes. And you'd have to be a dolt to be in possession of a substance with a high energy density and not realize it might be made to explode. Personally, I find the idea of IGE very intriguing, its quite remarkable. But its also spooky: I envision regular visits from spy and military agents who deliver thuggish messages and injunctions. You may as well be working on anthrax or something, one of these hot-button topics that eventually get turned into a Hollywood movie after the protagonist drowns in 3 inches of water. linas 16:57, 10 December 2006 (UTC)

Actually, there is a lot of work on IGE (as distinct from the Hf-controversy) that is surely interdisciplinary. One is "Quantum nucleonics" introduced by the Russians and who so far have avoided introducing this intriguing topic anywhere in Wiki. It is the analog for proton transitions of almost all of the tricks of quantum electronics with electron transitions. There are also the interests in nuclear waste remediation by speeding up the radioactive decay, which for gamma emitters is IGE. That's again best approached from an atomic physics viewpoint. Finally, I think I should ask everyone to keep in mind that most isomers do not store such great energies. I really think that the IGE topic is pure research and no more to do with weapons than thermodynamics. We would not be considering a category of weapons for thermodynamics. I think it is the same for IGE. The other page about the Hf-controversy might be weapons, so perhaps we should consider each separately. Frankly, I think that if Nuclear interdisciplinary sticks around a while, we will find it collecting some interesting articles on different places along what seems an exciting revitalization of one frontier of Nuclear Physics.

--Drac2000 00:36, 11 December 2006 (UTC)