Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aether and general relativity

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 of the debate was delete. Mailer Diablo 15:40, 24 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Aether and general relativity

Yes, this article has many quotes, which I don't doubt. But this compilation and comments makes it Original Research and the article has to be deleted according to our WP:NOR policy. --Pjacobi 21:13, 16 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete — To me the content looks like mostly non-neutral, personal editorial "research" that employs technical jargon and quotations from Einstein to provide an aura of credibility. It is an awkward read that doesn't really clarify anything with respect to "aether" IMO. Note that this article is linked as a "main article" from the Aether theories page. — RJH 17:04, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
• Delete. It definitely reads like non-neutral original research. Jude (talk,contribs,email) 01:49, 21 April 2006 (UTC)
• Comment. I'd swear I've seen this stuff before in another article article. I've asked ErkDemon to fix problems with several articles (or rather, disorganized notes for articles) which he has started and apparently abandoned. In this one, buried in the sand I see some hints of one side of a multifaceted and subtle but notable topic, related to issues which are sometimes discussed under the heading of Mach's principle. But I think we all agree that this "article" is not an article at all, but rather disorganized jottings which apparently represent Erk's attempt to start writing an essay promoting his somewhat idiosyncratic views. (In this sense, I agree with Pjacobi that Erk's version of this article violates WP:NOR.) Another article by Erk, Objections to general relativity obviously suffers from similar problems, and upon closer reading also proves to be wandering, repetitive, and to entirely ignore a host of equally important objections to gtr.

Here is my alternative proposal: I propose we

1. move this and Objections to general relativity to Erk's user space as User:ErkDemon/Aether and general relativity and User:ErkDemon/Objections to general relativity respectively,
2. leave a polite message on his talk page encouraging him to develop his thinking in this sandbox,
3. demand that he seek some peer review before moving anything back to article space.

I propose this because I suspect Erk is struggling to organize his thoughts; I think he's put more work into these protoessays than may appear from their inchoate state. But he does need to recognize that they are still very much at a sandbox stage, far from ready to present to the world even as essays, much less as reasonably unbiased encyclopedia articles. Also, of course, essays should go on his personal web pages, or in his user space at the very most. I do think it should be possible to write genuine encyclopedia articles on each of these topics, but I don't know whether Erk should be trying to do that himself since he seems to have rather narrow and idiosyncratic views. I also wish he understood that you can't even write an essay by quotations out of context, much less an encyclopedia article.

If the rest of you think my proposal is impractical, I'll change my vote to delete at least Aether and general relativity since I certainly don't think we can permit "articles" in such a sorry state as these to hang around indefinitely without substantial improvement. ---CH 07:29, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

No hard objections to userfy, even it means we have to face new round of discussions in the future. Hinting about the different policy of Wikinfo has also been tried in similiar cases. --Pjacobi 13:50, 21 April 2006 (UTC)

I agree that in its current state it doesn't seem very useful, at least for me. However in principle an article on this topic could be useful, as whether there is an ether in our world is a current topic of data-driven active debate (there's the blueshift of the cosmic microwave background giving a preferred frame, and then the ultra high energy cosmic rays that again point to frame-dependent physics). On the other hand, while these involve the real world they aren't built into general relativity. General relativity is pretty clear cut, it comes with a metric that transforms covariantly and whether you want to call this Mach's principle or an aether is a matter of semantics or philosophy. JarahE 18:40, 23 April 2006 (UTC)

• Delete – This seems to be an odd situation: Aether theories are of historical interest, and historical comparisons of various types of aether model would seem to be legitimate: general relativity is of interest: discussions of relativity theory often say that aether theory(ies) are known to be disproved. And yet, we have an article by Einstein (currently in print, verifiable, in paperback), declaring general relativity as being effectively a special class of aether theory.

I would have thought that the existence of this Einstein article and its "gist" was worth documenting, if only because GR people seem to have a habit of insisting that Einstein said no such thing, until they are confronted with quotes. Provide a quote, and one tends to be told that it's been taken out of context. Provide a much larger quote to make it obvious that one isn’t quoting selectively, and other objections appear. Ask the critic if they have ever actually 'read' the article that they say is being misrepresented, and you tend not to get an answer.

The idea discussed in the article 'is' idiosyncratic to modern eyes, but the argument was Einstein's, not mine. As for the idea of getting the thing peer reviewed, well, thew wiki rules say that the criteria for inclusion are about verifiability rather than correctness, and even if you think that Einstein was off his rocker at the time, you can still buy the documentary evidence of what he said at your local university bookshop.

CH: re "quotations out of context", both quotations were Einstein's one was from "Aether and the theory of relativity" lecture (1920), and the other was from "Relativity and the problem of space: The concept of space in the general theory of relativity": Both Einstein quotes were VERY much in context: if you are claiming otherwise, I suggest that you find something to back up this assertion: I don’t think that you can. I've seen the "out of context" objection used a lot in the past, speciously, as a way of objecting to something that ios both factual and verifiable, presumably in the hope that other readers might take it on trust that it 'is' out of context, without actually checking. Perhaps a better article on Einstein's argument could be written, but complaining that it includes too much of Einstein's actual words seems to be an odd thing to do, since Einstein's writing is quite efficient, and putting words in his mouth doesn't seem efficient when the actual quotes are available.

As far as Wiki editors with "bees in their bonnets" about certain issues, well, I notice C.H., that you still seem to be managing to insist, in almost every article that you comment on, that it really ought to be rewritten to be more about Mach's Principle! If I sound like a stuck record on certain topics, then so do you! Please, don't keep telling everyone else to write articles the about Mach's Principle that you want to read – do some work, write it yourself and let the rest of us get some peace! :) I keep reading on Wiki that you could write better articles on some of these subjects yourself, but that your time is too valuable ... well, perhaps for the rest of us, our time is valuable too ... so I'd suggest that in these cases perhaps if you can write the article, do, if you can't, don't. The "Oh dear, this article is very bad, I could do much better, but unfortunately I'm very busy so the person ought to do more work to bring it up to my exacting standards" bit begins to wear a bit thin after a while.

You should also note that using the vfd page for one article to suggest and discuss the possible deletion of another by the same author is probably bad practice: discussions about whether an article should be deleted should be visible to users browsing that article, so that they have a chance to enter the debate, and discussions about deleting an article should properly only concern themselves with the article's contents, not the identity of the author.

Having said all that, I'm voting to delete my own article because by Dec 2005 I'd gotten sick of all the anonymous personal attacks on Wiki, and decided that this wasn't somewhere I wanted to hang out any more, so I don’t intend to expand or improve any of these articles any further, and as far as I'm concerned, you can delete all of them.

Cheerio, ErkDemon 22:37, 23 April 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.