Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Boltzmon

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was delete. W.marsh 00:24, 6 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Boltzmon

At the very least, non-notable. At the worst, complete bollocks. A Google search returns 616 results, and I think that most of those are due to a book named Boltzmon, which is possibly what the article is based on. A Google Scholar search returns 3 hits, all non-notable. The Arxiv returns nothing. Mike Peel 14:46, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - This looks like an obscure non-notable black hole hypothesis that may not have even passed through peer review in the scientific literature. It does not belong on Wikipedia for many reasons. George J. Bendo 15:21, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - original research exclusion. --ScienceApologist 16:07, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - Fails to be notable as a scientific theory. EdJohnston 17:07, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete - Seems not verifiable/notable since no peer-reviewed paper mentions it. Awolf002 17:58, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Comment. This is clearly referenced (Ferris, Timothy. The Whole Shebang, 1997 Simon & Schuster), and here you can search inside this source (search for "Boltzmon") to see the passage from which the present text was derived. The source is not the book by William Sleator, who probably took ideas from the Shebang book, which was well known, as it had just been the main selection of the Book of the Month Club. Apart from notability and the neological character of the name of the hypothetical particle, this seems legit to me. Evidence that this is not purely the result of the imagination of the author is provided by this quote from a article inspired by a workshop in honour of Stephen Hawking: In the ensuing 20 years, opinions have split mostly along party lines. Particle physicists like Dr. Susskind and Dr. Gerard 't Hooft, a physicist at the University of Utrecht and the 1999 Nobel Prize winner, defend quantum theory and say that the information must get out somehow, perhaps subtly encoded in the radiation. Another possibility — that the information was left behind in some new kind of elementary particle when the black hole evaporated — seems to have fallen from favor. I don't have an immediate recommendation to the disposition of the article, but think that account of this should be taken. Perhaps this could be a paragraph in Black hole thermodynamics or Gerard 't Hooft.  --Lambiam^Talk 18:23, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

From the above information, I gather that the only reference that uses the word "boltzmon" is a popular science book that probably did not undergo a rigorous peer-review process. Do you have references from a peer-reviewed scientific journal that use the word "boltzmon"? That would demonstrate that someone has used "botzmon" as a name for something connected to a black hole. Anyhow, the fact that the only specific mention of "boltzmon" is buried deep within a popular science book further demonstrates that the term is non-notable. It is far more likely that someone will find this article when misspelling Boltzmann, and I think the aricle should be made a redirect to that article rather than be kept in Wikipedia. George J. Bendo 19:16, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete: The given excerpt from the book only states that some unnamed (!) theoretical physicists brought forward this boltzmon hypothesis. This sounds very much as if the book's author just happened to mention some fancy idea somebody overheard within some conferece gossip but that is ever made it into a scholary article. (Google Scholar has zero hits!) Wikipedia does not document scientific ideas in its larva state, not even if some more or less renowned science writer was so uncareful as to mention it with three sentences in a book. Furthermore: The text in the article is a literal excerpt from this paragraph in the book, hence it is also a copyright violation! Simon A. 21:35, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

• Delete Naming this hypothetical entity after Ludwig Boltzmann is just confusing in my opinion. And there is no evidence physical or theoretical for its existence of which I am aware. JRSpriggs 05:18, 30 October 2006 (UTC)

• Weak keep per User:Lambiam. I'm very wishy-washy about the article as currently written. The debate about information, entropy and black holes, however, is very notable, and so this idea deserves documentation somewhere, somehow. linas 15:03, 31 October 2006 (UTC)

• Strong keep. Very interesting article. Also, I have the Whole Shebang, and this article is not copied from the paragraph describing the boltzmon. ♃ Dr. Yuriev 01:46, 3 November 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.