Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Aryabhata's relativity principle

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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 Redirect to Aryabhata. The article contains material that might be usefully included in the Aryabhata article, but per the arguments the title of this article is WP:POV unsupported by the sources and as such not acceptable by policies. Edit history remains, so editors can merge the useful elements (a 5th century text is not copyrighted btw). ~ trialsanderrors 08:44, 23 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Aryabhata's relativity principle

Aryabhata's relativity principle (edit|talk|history|links|watch|logs)

This article violates WP:RS as the reference is not published in a peer-reviewed journal, and therefore the view promoted violates WP:OR. Also I suspect a violation of WP:COPY since the text is lifted wholesale from the reference. Finally, the quoted text is not a principle of relativity. See talk:Aryabhata's relativity principle for more info. Delete -- EMS | Talk 15:10, 16 November 2006 (UTC)

  • Delete. Come on. It's not even a GOOD hoax... -Amarkov blahedits 15:31, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment The source for the article is hosted in arxiv.org which is the repositoty for scientific papers, which means the paper has had some face time to verify it, othewise it would not be hosted. What do Wikipedians think. scope_creep 16:01, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
    • The paper is listed under "History of physics" my impression is that the bar for being listed in the history sections of the ArXiv is very low. JoshuaZ 16:04, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
      • The bar for ArXiv as a whole is fairly low. You need to either be an established academian or endorsed by an established academian to put an article in there. In general these are articles for which publication is being sought. However, many (if not most) arXiv papers are not published. More to the point, a "journal-ref" field will be filled in by the author once publication has been achieved, or a notation made in the "Comments" field if the article has been accepted for publication. Neither is visible in the abstract page for the cited article, hence the conclusion that it is not a reliable source --EMS | Talk 20:53, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as outright idiocy and OR. The Crying Orc 17:48, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. One paper that is not peer reviewed does not suffice. The author of the paper at arXiv is a PhD student in electrical engineering at Louisiana State University. It is my understanding that papers submitted by somebody attached to a bona fide university will be accepted at the arXiv (http://arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html says "During the initial deployment of the system, we may also give automatic endorsements to submitters from known academic institutions"). However, I haven't found an explanation of the details of the procedure. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 03:32, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
    • All that I can add to this is that the goal of the new arXiv system is to keep the "cranks" out of their system, while permitting a much academic material to be presented as reasonably possible. It makes sense that LSU may be an "open" domain for arXiv. This also would be far from the first time that arXiv has had someone post an article on a topic which falls outside of their primary area of study. --EMS | Talk 06:29, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete as per EMS' initial posting above. MP (talk) 20:18, 17 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete per nom. utcursch | talk 13:14, 18 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. See also ongoing Afd for Indian relativity. Pavel Vozenilek 02:35, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Do not delete. The idea of different worlds in motion with similar laws (obvioiusly not equivalent to modern relativity but a relativity principle nevertheless) also occurs in Yoga Vasishtha (an important later text, which allows us to determine how the cryptic verses of Aryabhta are to be interpreted). Here're two early references that speak of Aryabhata's relativity:
The Aryabhatiya of Aryabhata, An Ancient Indian Work on Mathematics and Astronomy by Walter Eugene Clark: Reviewed by M. J. Babb, Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 51, No. 1 (Mar., 1931), pp. 51-52
Aryabhatiya by Aryabhata, translation and commentary by Shukla and Sarma. Indian National Science Academy, New Delhi, 1976.
Early commentaries by Somesvara, Lalla, and so on, on the Aryabhatiya (Aryabhata's book) indicate that his understanding was in terms of the same laws applying to objects that were in relative motion, as is evident from the above two references.MarcAurel 04:02, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment - This is almost a joke. The article has been edited to explicitly claim that the principle of relativity was being used, but no additional evidence is presented. Mr. Aurel is also holding up two new references here at the last minute, but fails to quote anything out of them. (I also find it odd that these references are being presented now instead of having been cited in the article initially.) Even this posting raises questions: Mr. Aurel talks about Aryabnhata thinking of "different worlds in motion with similar laws", but the relativity principle calls for all reference frames to have the same laws, not similar laws. In the article Mr. Aurel now also correctly notes that Aryabhata must have been aware of the concept of a frame of reference. That is all fine and dandy, but the idea that a dropped ball will fall the same way with respect to you no matter how you are moving along the surface of the Earth is a major breakthrough for which the concept of a frame of reference is only the foundation. Overall, if the term "Aryahbata's relativity principle" is not a neologism, then it certainly is a misleading phrase which implicitily gives Aryabhata credit with something that he did not achieve. As I see it, Aryabhata really did achieve a lot. There is no need to exagerate his accomplishemens. --EMS | Talk 05:17, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
The relevant portion from the 1931 reference is:

Most interesting and surprising are (IV,9) "as a man in a boat going forward sees a stationary object moving backward, just so at Lanka a man sees the stationary asterisms moving backard," and also in (IV,12) last sentence, "the gods and dwellers in hell both think constantly that the others are beneath them." This appreciation of relativity reconciles Aryabhata's position on the stationary earth for which he has been criticized by other Hindu writes.

The appreciation of relativity is indeed interesting and should probably be noted in Aryabhata, but it is not the relativity principle. The reference does not claim that Aryabhata understood that the same laws apply to objects in relative motion. -- Jitse Niesen (talk) 07:20, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
Jitse - I think that it would have been more appropriate to write "The appreciation frames of reference is ...". There is not an appreciation of relativity here, but an appreciation instead of relative viewpoints. --EMS | Talk 15:57, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Do Not Delete :-Bharatveer 05:25, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Reword -- Some facts about modern relativity theory: Modern relativity theory came about based on a long series of observations and experiments (Fizeau, Michelson-Morley,Newton's onservations etc.) that Aryabhatta or his contemporaries could not possibly have done. The statement "Just as someone in a boat moving sees the stationary objects (on either side of the river) as moving backward, similarly are the stationary stars seen by people at Lanka (reference co-ordinate on the equator), as moving exactly towards the west." has more to do with a kind of vague Galilean Relativity than Einstein's Relativity. Special Relativity is based on the invariance of the Minkowski metric and the fact that it generates a transformation law that is counterintuitive as compared to the Galilean Transformation.Plus, General Relativity would be completely beyond people in the 5th century BC. While it is ignorant to call this a "hoax" (as people above did), and Aryabhatta's observations and notes here are interesting in the context that it does seem to talk about "Frames of reference" in some roundabout way.Thus, it is technically correct to call it a "Principle of Relativity".However, since the phrase "relativity" is invariably associated with Einsteinian relativity it becomes misleading to call Aryabhatta's a "Principle of Relativity" as it creates the misconception that he came up with the fundamental postulates before Einstein. The best thing to do is to explain that he was talking about a very basic philosophy of "frames of reference".Now, I glanced through the Parakh paper here. The ref "Roger Billard, L’astronomie Indienne. Paris: Publications de l’ecole francaise d’extreme-orient, 1971" seems to show that Aryabhatta's observations were grounded in experiments and that he showed that the Earth rotates. I'm not sure on how to reword it but I think that the basic precept is sound.Perhaps "Aryabhatta's Principle of Relative Transformations" or something.Hkelkar 08:24, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
    • using "relativity" is no problem, we have Galilean_relativity, and nobody but our most illiterate readers will think that means Galileo discovered Einsteinian relativity. It is justified to compare Aryabhata's two verses to Galileo. It is also well known that European science only in the 17th century caught up with things that had been known since at least 400 BC, and it is very plausible to state that Aryabhata was aware of things that were at the time unknown to western science (but that doesn't put him 'first' automatically). I argue for merge below since these are essentially speculations based on two verses of Aryabhata's treatise that may well be treated in the main Aryabhata article, there isn't really all that much to say about it. dab (ᛏ) 10:44, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
      • At least this poster agrees that a description involving the use of frames of reference does not constitute a statement of the principle of relativity. However, I cannot go along with making up a new name for Aryabhata's observation as that would be a neologism and therefore a violation of WP:OR. --EMS | Talk 15:50, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Strong Keep Einstein didn't discover relativity, see Relativity_priority_dispute. Dionyseus 08:48, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • That's a non sequitur, but it's raining outside. The Crying Orc 08:51, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • merge with Aryabhata. There is very little material worth keeping here. The fact that Aryabhata was aware of frames of reference is certainly notable, but it fits very well onto his own article. The claim that this is the earliest discussion of the topic 'in the history of science' badly needs a reference. Off the top of my head, you can find at least as sophisticated discussions of this in Lucretius, and that's just an artistic adaptation of 'science' predating Aryabhata by at least eight centuries. dab (ᛏ) 09:41, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Keep and rewrite per Hkelkar.Bakaman Bakatalk 15:11, 22 November 2006 (UTC)
  • Delete. The interpretation given is original research, the sources given don't suppport the claims. --Pjacobi 19:11, 22 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.