User talk:Hallenrm
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I am Rakesh Mohan Hallen. I am above 50 and taken up science communication as my vocation. I hold a doctrate degree in Chemistry from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur India and have authored over a hundred articles in popular science magazines.
I like wikipedia and hypography science forums, they offer me an opportunity to futroo, an activity I cherish.Charlie 11:23, 28 February 2006 (UTC)
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[edit] Energy
Hi Hallenrm, thanks for the note on my page and sorry I haven't answered earlier, haven't had time to edit lately. No problem reverting me on the energy article. I'm going to add a little more to the intro; the article really needs a simple, clear definition of physical work. --Sullevon 17:35, 29 April 2006 (UTC)
[edit] Edits to my changes in Energy
You wrote: I have been activly editing the energy page. I noticed your recent edits. However, I have some minor differences in opinion. In my opinion there is no need for detailed explanations, providing links to pages that have the required information should be sufficient.
In addition, I believe I have more experience than you regarding communicating this topic to the general reader.Charlie 03:12, 20 May 2006 (UTC)
- Comment: Having published a dozen articles in popular science magazines myself, I’m not impressed. Most of the publications (the smaller ones, which all but a very few are) pay little or nothing per word, and it’s fairly easy to write well enough to “work” for them, for nearly free, or actually free. If you’ve actually made a writer’s living working for Discover or Scientific American or Popular Science or Wired, then I’ll be impressed with your “credentials” as a writer. But I doubt that you have. On the other hand, if you’ve merely spent more time than I have, doing what is essentially volunteer work for smaller editors of smaller popular publications, then that only means you’ve wasted more of your life doing this, than I have. I hate to tell you this, but if you haven’t made a living at it (popular writing), then all this extra experience is with marshmellow editors of small publications, as an amateur. So what? That’s like saying you’ve played more golf than I have, implying therefore that you’re more of an "expert" on golf. Let me know how much you’ve made on the pro circuit.
- I do have a degree in chemistry and one in medicine, and a list of academic papers and patents, so I’m reasonably confident that I can communicate well enough to make myself understood. Beyond that, this is Wikipedia, where it’s every editor for himself. You can’t live here on your laurels. If you ruthlessly prune other people’s writing according to your personal philosophy of economy of style, you’re going to soon find yourself eventually on the other end of that unpleasant experience. So be nice.
- There are several philosophies of writing these articles. One of them is that articles should always generally stand by themselves, for the large class of readers who aren’t going to bother to click on the hundreds of internal links they may contain. One could easily write an article on energy (physics) which was not much more than the present disambiguation page for energy. Why indeed do anything else?
- For the reader who is trying to seek a overview of physics energy, and the role it plays in transforming the world, without reading every sub-topic article mentioned, it is probably necessary to put in something of why energetic processes do what they do. That is what I have been attempting to do. It hardly helps in this process if you revert my edits and stick in references to entropy and free energy. Not only don’t most people understand these topics, but they won’t understand them very much better even after reading the Wiki’s on them (these lack non-technical overviews also, and need their own rewrites). So what you’re doing, is damaging.
- I’ll give you an example. You’re reverted the article to say that biological processes are driven by “transformations” of energy. That conveys no information at all. You might as well say changes in biology are driven by “change”. We have energy transformations. So what drives the TRANSFORMATIONS?? You cannot discuss this without discussing the mechanism of entropy, whether you want to use the name or not. I propose that the idea of what is happening, when entropy increases during an energetic transformation, can be communicated generally and non-mathematically, without bringing entropy up, except peripherally. If you don’t do that, you end up just pointing people to the entropy page, and leaving them with a mystery.
- You left the discussion of chemistry saying that free energy was an “interplay” of energy and entropy. You claim to love generality and fundamentality, but fundamentally, this is NOT the most general way to understand chemical changes, or free energy. Just because there’s one term in one kind of free energy equation that contains energy (or heat), and another one that contains a term for entropy, does not mean that two separate processes are working. Rather, the heat term is only there because of what that heat does to entropy. Likewise, all the other terms in all the various equations for Gibbs and Helmholz free energy, all are there because of what they do to changes in entropy. So, entropy is the way to understand these processes, and all the energetic transformations in chemistry also. We only need to choose if we have to (or want to) go through all that statistical thermodynamics for our gentle reader. No? Then, should we merely refer our gentle reader to the statistical thermo Wiki article? I say, also, no. That doesn't help the general reader. But the way things are in this article doesn’t help the general reader, either. Sbharris 00:21, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
[edit] License tagging for Image:Rmh2.jpg
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[edit] Please read up on physical sciences
I really cannot understand you, all of a sudden after several months, you decide to pop up and carry out unneccesary edits. For example, what prompted you to edit out the first paragraph. The article on energy does not belong solely to physics (or physical science) as is abundantly clear in its contents. It is about a concept in science, which includes biology, geology meterology just to count a few. If you are solely obssessed with physics, please control your impulses.Charlie 08:22, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
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I have spent several months letting you and others sort out what you want to do with the energy article. Okay. However, it still needs lots of work. I did not write "physics," but "physical sciences," which of course are not the same thing, as you should very well know as a science writer, and (if not) as you'd discover if you merely read the wiki on physical sciences. The latter term is inclusive of physics and includes geology and meteorology. Apparently you didn't realize this. Also it includes chemistry, and other earth sciences like hydrology, oceanography, soil science, and so on. And planetary sciences and all of astronomy, of course. The term doesn't include the social sciences or political sciences, but in this case we don't want it to. The one place where energy is used in "joules" but which isn't covered by "physical sciences" would be certain "life sciences". It would have been so nice if you'd just suggested adding that, instead of just misusing the English language, which is what you are here doing, not I. As for whether my edits are "necessary" or not, that is not up to you to judge. We've been over that. If you insist on misusing or misunderstanding common English, making reflexive edits, and then following them with insulting comments on other editors' TALK pages, you're going to get yourself into trouble on Wikipedia. So this is another warning. This is your LAST warning from me. Stop it. SBHarris 23:13, 12 January 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Energy
User:Sbharris has asked me on my talk page at User talk:Bduke to try to help in the disagreement you are having on this article. I will try to help if you will allow me. This is an article that is not on my watch list so it is new to me. I ask you to reply on my talk page and the debate can go on there. It is getting late at night here and I am rather exhausted as last night was too hot to sleep well. I am therefore asking you and User:Sbharris to both try to state clearly on my talk page what you think the problem with this article is and why you are disagreeing. Could you please do that? I will try to help tomorrow or whenever I get your views. I really am not sure that you are far apart. There is often an artificial difference between how chemists and physicists think. Please try to remain civil to each other. --Bduke 11:24, 19 January 2007 (UTC)
Your recent edit to Energy is very confusing. Consider:
- Some energy can be released as a result of rearrangement of bonds between atoms of a chemical substance (or a mixture thereof) only if the energy in the reactant chemical substances is more than that in product substances. Thus, in chemical thermodynamics the term used for the chemical potential energy is chemical potential and for chemical transformation an equation most often used is Gibbs-Duhem equation.
You added the second sentence. The first is talking about internal energy (U). The second is talking about chemical potential which is related to the Gibbs Free Energy (G). There is therefore no "Thus" about it. Your sentence does not follow from the first and is actually talking about something completed different. The sentence after the Gibbs-Duhem equation "However, the change in internal energy can also be construed as the change in chemical potential energy" is true only if chemical potential energy is used in the sense of this article, i.e. as internal energy and not as the chemical potential which is different. Roughly, spontaneous process go with a decrease in chemical potential, but that can be with an increase in internal energy - i.e. an endothermic reaction. The point about the Gibbs-Duhem equation and the chemical potential does need to be mentioned somewhere, but not here and then more as a "do not confuse this use of chemical potential energy with the chemical potential". --Bduke 07:59, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- I have replied on my talk page, to keep the discussion in one place after you kindly copied my initial point there. --Bduke 20:56, 15 February 2007 (UTC)
[edit] Request for edit summary
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