User:Alvestrand/POV-history

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A history of a POV debate This is an attempt at pulling together a history of an event of POV-pushing that afflicted Wikipedia. I don't know if it is appropriate as an article, so I'm just keeping it as one of my personal pages for now.

See also Wikipedia:Requests for comment/Licorne and Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Licorne

Contents

[edit] Subject area of the debate

The debate concerned the relative contributions of Einstein, Poincare, Hilbert and others in creating the Special Theory of Relativity and the General Theory of Relativity. The external-to-Wikipedia facts behind the dispute are collected (to the best of the contributors' ability) on Relativity priority disputes.

[edit] Actors

The following people and IP addresses were engaged in the debate:

[edit] The POV-pusher

This lists IPs and accounts that are suspected of being the single person who's pushing the POV

  • User:69.22.98.162 (contributions) - started this round of the debate on Jan 31, after confining most of his attention to Henri Poincare from December 28; first contribution on November 26, 2005; stopped contributing on Feb 1. IP is an Earthlink/Mindspring cable subscriber in Tampa Bay, FL.
  • User:69.22.98.146 (contributions) - contributed only on Einstein, started Feb 1, 2006 - IP in the same netblock as above.
  • User:66.194.104.5 (contributions) - misc contributions Nov 18, 2004 - Feb 3, 2005 - after that, 100ish contributions to Henri Poincare talk. IP is assigned to Time Warner Telecom, and seems to be in use by St. Petersburg College, FL.
  • User:Licorne (contributions) - ~200 contributions Feb 12, 2006 - Feb 15, 2006 - all of them in Talk:Henri Poincare and Talk:Albert Einstein

He has made statements that can be interpreted as saying that these sources are different people; 69 denying being 17, Licorne denying being 66/69. However, his phrasing is odd; he might be leaving himself loopholes.

He's not given much personal detail about himself. A rare exception is this from the Albert Einstein "talk" page: "I attended a conference in Paris about three years ago by Jean-Paul Auffray, with Jules Leveugle..." - his id means "unicorn" in French; it seems reasonable to assume that he's a French speaker.

It seems 69 has revealed his name in this post, as Dean Mamas with a Ph. D. from UCLA. A google search on "D. Mamas" +physics revealed these publications:

  1. Negative Ion Plasmas, A.Y. Wong, D.L. Mamas and D. Arnush, Phys. of Fluids 18, 1489 (1975).
  2. Stabilization of Toroidal Currents in High Plasmas by Surface Magnetic Fields, D. Mamas, R. Schumacher, A.Y. Wong and R. Bruen, Phys. Rev. Lett. 41, 29 (1978).
  3. Confinement of High b Plasmas by Toroidal Surmacs, A.Y. Wong, R. Schumacher and D. Mamas, Comments on Plasma Physics and Controlled Fusion, Vol. IV, 3, 65 (1978).

ussearch.com claims that there are 5 people named "Dean Mamas" in Florida, 3 of which are aged 56, and 2 of which have no age, located in Port Richey and Largo, both of which are consistent with the Tampa Bay location of the IP addresses used - it's not unreasonable to guess that there's only one person.

A search for "Dean L Mamas" turns up [1], which he signs with the title "Independent researcher".

Fastfission found the following citation for his PhD, which gives his birth year as 1949:

Author/Name: Mamas, Dean Leo, 1949-
Title: Negative ion plasmas : confinement of toroidal plasma currents by surface magnetic fields / by Dean Leo Mamas. --
Published/distributed: 1977.
Physical description: ix, 80 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.
Subject(s): Plasma dynamics.
Genre/form: Dissertations, Academic --UCLA --Physics.
Record ID: 2268898
Collection: UCLA Libraries and Collections

He's also been active on the "altcosmology" Yahoo! Groups site:

He claims to have been interviewed by French radio: "I was personally interviewed at length on two national French Radio stations from Paris and I said it all" [2]

[edit] IP addresses

Many of these were mostly only seen at the poll found at [3] - permlink [4] of whether to delete the Keswani quote from Poincare's page, and in comments on the poll. The list now contains all IP addresses I've seen Licorne using, including the ones listed above.

  • 17.255.240.78 (talk · contribs · block log) - 7 Wikipedia contributions Feb 5 - Feb 15 2006, one of which was not Einstein-related. IP (a /8 block) is assigned to Apple Computer; it seems to be connected through Tampa, Florida.
  • 64.12.116.198 (talk · contribs · block log) - AOL account; these seem very hard to match up with anything, according to the Wikipedia warning on its user talk page.
  • 66.194.98.160 (talk · contribs · block log) - Time Warner Telecom (used briefly by Licorne on March 18, 2006, some older edits appear to be someone else)
  • 66.194.98.170 (talk · contribs · block log) - 3 Einstein-related contributions on February 10. IP is from Time Warner Telecom, subassigned to city of Clearwater (probably Florida).
  • 66.194.98.232 (talk · contribs · block log) - Time Warner Telecom - used briefly on March 2, 2006 by Licorne only)
  • 66.194.104.5 (talk · contribs · block log) - misc contributions Nov 18, 2004 - Feb 3, 2005 - after that, 100ish contributions to Henri Poincare talk. IP is assigned to Time Warner Telecom, and seems to be in use by St. Petersburg College, FL.
  • 67.78.143.226 (talk · contribs · block log) - 4 contributions total, 1 not Einstein-related in August 2005, 3 Einstein-related on Feb 10, 2006. IP is from RoadRunner, probably in the South-East; it seems to be connected through Tampa, Florida. Also used to evade a Licorne block on March 6.
  • 67.79.157.50 (talk · contribs · block log) - used by (we assume) Licorne on March 19, 2006, while Licorne was blocked. RoadRunner Tampa Bay connection.
  • 69.22.98.146 (talk · contribs · block log) - contributed only on Einstein, started Feb 1, 2006 - IP in the same netblock as the next one.
  • 69.22.98.162 (talk · contribs · block log) - started this round of the debate on Jan 31, after confining most of his attention to Henri Poincare from December 28; first contribution on November 26, 2005; stopped contributing on Feb 1. IP is an Earthlink/Mindspring cable subscriber in Tampa Bay, FL.

[edit] Others

This list is in alphabetical order by username. The criterion for getting included is more than 5 contributions to one of the "talk" pages involved.

[edit] Pages affected

[edit] Timeline of the dispute

On December 28, 2005 at 04:00, 69.22.98.162 edited Einstein's page [5] with a claim that the reason Einstein was denied a Nobel for relativity because Henri Poincaré was the true discovererer. (An earlier edit from the same IP, [6], seems irrelevant to this debate. This was reverted by User:Triona four minutes later. He took the discussion to the talk page [7], and was told to provide sources [8] - he replies with Folsing's biography and www.xtxinc.com - Bjerknes' website.

He made 10 more attempts at editing the Einstein article that day, all challenging Einstein's claim to the relativity theories: [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17].

His next stop, at 23:13, was the David Hilbert page, where he edited in the claim that Hilbert published general relativity before Einstein [18], after which he referenced that in the Einstein article: [19].

The Hilbert edit was reverted as "unsourced" 16 minutes later.

User:Paul August took the repeated edits to the Einstein talk page as a topic headlined "Nobel Prise edit"; User:Fastfission, User:GangofOne and User:Lucidish all pointed out that the Nobel prize controversy was not over priority.

The following day, December 29, he turned his attention to Poincaré; his initial edits were [20] and [21]; the last one survived 5 hours, being reverted by User:Harald88 for lack of documentation. His talk page justification: [22], often repeated: [23], [24]

At this time, a pattern has been established: The person believes implicitly that Christopher Jon Bjerknes' claims about Einstein are true, and that the only documentation needed for that is a pointer to Bjerknes' website.

By January 6, much debate has been had on the talk pages, and he sees the need to cite other sources: [25] points to biographies by Keswani, Whittaker and Kip Thorne.

[edit] Kip Thorne is good, then bad

He first quoted Thorne as supporting (whatever), but later Thorne was fully quoted, and he attacked Thorne for being wrong: [26]

on 21:49, 15 February 2006 (UTC), he claims to have said that Thorne was right, but wrong...

[edit] "Hilbert published first"

pulled up sharply by Rodasmith: [27]; Licorne keeps to his statement that it's "obvious": [28]

[edit] H.E. Ives challenging Einstein's derivation of E=mc2

Introduced at [29], more at [30]

[edit] Folsing biography

Introduced at [31]

[edit] "Meiner Theorie" strawman

(this is distilled from the Talk:Albert Einstein page)

Seeing a need to cite primary sources, Licorne (as 69.22.98.146) finds a quote from Hilbert, where he thinks that Hilbert calls GR "meiner theorie". [32].

He returns to the subject in detail on Feb 15, with a new section: [33], and this time includes the reference.

Fastfission finds the original text and cites it at 21:20, 15 February 2006 (UTC), putting it up at Talk:Albert Einstein/Hilbert1924. Alvestrand comments on a grammatical oddity at 21:45, 15 February 2006 (UTC) - Jitse Nielsen translates the text and comments that Hilbert credits Einstein with the theory a few lines further up at 22:56, 15 February 2006 (UTC)

Undaunted, Licorne introduces the quote as evidence in the Einstein article on February 20: [34]

User:De kludde adds the issue to the "disputes" page on February 13: [35]

Unfortunately he misquotes Hilbert as saying ""Einstein kehrt schließlich in seinen letzten Publikationen geradewegs zu meiner Theorie zurück" - the reality, as seen in Talk:Albert Einstein/Hilbert1924 (temporary copy of some of Hilbert's 1924 article), is ""Einstein kehrt schließlich in seinen letzten Publikationen geradewegs zu den Gleichungen meiner Theorie zurück" - and the same text has Hilbert talking about "Gedankenbildungen der allgemeinen Relativitätstheorie von Einstein" - seemingly referring to Einstein's GR as a separate entity.

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