Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/General relativity

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] General relativity

See comment on talk page. Eyu100^{(t|fr|Version 1.0 Editorial Team)} 18:44, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

Which comment? -Ravedave ^{(help name my baby)} 18:53, 26 November 2006 (UTC)

• Object The article is filled with {{facts}}. Some of the lists can be converted to prose. The WP:LEAD needs expansion. BTW, am I right in guessing that the comment is Tompw's? AZ _t 21:12, 26 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment - The lead has now been expanded. Hopefully that will alleviate that one concern. --EMS | Talk 05:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
• Object Too many unreferences, not featured-quality. Hello32020 01:07, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Question - Is there more wrong with this article than its needing more references, or is that the only issue? (It does not surprise me that this article is failing the review, but I want to get as much out of this as I can given that it has been nominated so that it can become FA soon.) --EMS | Talk 05:12, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
• Object; the entire "Status" section is unsourced, lots of technical terms that the average lay-reader would not understand, such as unit vector, derivatives etc are not linked. Lots and lots of redlinks. Laïka 11:54, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
• Comment The "Quantum mechanics" section is only one sentence long, expand it or combine it with other sections. Jay32183 14:45, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Upon second look, the intro to that section is only one sentence long. Still an issue, but I needed to be specific. Jay32183 14:48, 27 November 2006 (UTC)
• Comment — It might have been helpful to first try a peer review and then bringing it up to good article status before making this a FAC. (In fact I sometimes wonder why GA isn't a prerequisite for an FA.) That being said, here's a few comments:
  • This article is written at a level that seems appropriate for somebody with a bachelors in physics, if not a physics graduate student. So in that sense it appears as more of a review for those who are already familiar with the subject matter. I'm not at all clear that this is going to be helpful to those looking for an overview. Even the introduction requires a certain level of knowledge of the topic. So it might make sense to place the "For a non-technical introduction to the topic..." line at the very top.
  • Normally the history is placed near the top of the article so that the reader can get a historical perspective on the development. The current history seems a little weak, however, particularly on the post-Einstein history. (No offense intended.)
  • There are several red links that need to be addressed.
  • This sentence seems somehow incomplete: "Multiple views of the same object: Observations of quasars whose light passes close to an intervening galaxy." Did it intent to show that this effect was confirmed? (I.e. because the luminosity variations of the multiple quasar images matched up?)
  • The topic of gravitational radiation is mentioned several times but I didn't see it explained in terms of space-time curvature. It might be useful to explain this prior to the Predictions section.
  • Are the "Geodetic precession" and "Frame dragging" predictions redundant? They both use the same test of the changing gyroscope orientation. If not then some clarification would be helpful
  • Dark energy was predicted by general relativity? I can see the connection of the cosmological constant, but I thought this was only discovered due to observation of supernovae? So how is it a prediction? I thought that up until that time the constant was thought to be near zero, so that the universe would not be "required" to accelerate? Pardon my ignorance.
  • The equation "2MG/c^2" should use the math notation instead.
  • As a whole the article needs to be much better referenced, particularly the "Status" section which is essentially a commentary.
• Thanks. — RJH (talk) 20:52, 29 November 2006 (UTC)

  • RJH - First of all my thanks for the comments. I will seek to deal with these issues over time. As for some specifics:
    • On how this page came to be nominated: Other editors seem to have been impressed enough with it to cause this to happen. While I am quite flattered that this happenned (as I have put a lot of work into this article), it is not at all a surprise to me that this nomination has failed. It seems to me that the process you outlined is the way to go.
    • On the history: I will consider your comment, although I feel that a discussion of what GR is is more important than its history. I do agree that more needs to be said about GR after Einstein however.
    • Gravitational lensing has indeed been confirmed by observations of what are obviosuly multiple images of the same pulsar. The identifications are made by their having identical spectra (which are more consistent than luminosity variations). Additional confirmation has been obtained from luminosity variations, but there is often a lag time between images of years!
    • dark energy is a prediction based on the observation of supernovas which indicate that the universe is undergoing an accelerating expansion. If the expansion is really accelerating and if general relativity is correct, then the universe must be 70% dark energy.

  In any case, thanks again for the helpful comments. --EMS | Talk 04:21, 4 December 2006 (UTC)