Talk:Sign convention

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Perhaps some new theorems will be found someday which 'might' bring some order to different usages of the sign conversion. Or a term is really not so important in discerning of one theory's correctness?.. --XJamRastafire 02:05, 26 Aug 2003 (UTC)

1 Self-reference
2 Minor updates
3 Anecdote
4 Story
5 Curvature

[edit] Self-reference

I (rephrased and) removed the following self-referential text from the article:

Since the physics-related content in this encyclopedia is written by many different mathematicians and physicists, there is no guarantee of consistency in sign conventions here.

I suppose sign conventions ought to be established here, then. —Kdau 19:24, 2005 Jan 3 (UTC)

[edit] Minor updates

I've replaced the reference to the Faraday two-form by 'field strenght tensor', since I've never before heard the other term used. In addition, the problem with sign conventions in the exponential factor arises not only with electrodynamic waves but in all cases where one deals with Fourier transforms of real-valued waves, and the choice is that of whether positive-energy (=positive-frequency) waves turn clockwise or counterclockwise, I'm happy if someone puts this into a few more words.

Finally, the choice of the sign of work in the first law of thermodynamics is really different from the other sign choices because this happens to change the physical meaning. One way, work is defined as the work done on the system, the other way it's the work done by the system. So it's not really a sign convention, but rather a convention as to what the symbols mean.

TobiS 15:55, 2005 Jun 17 (UTC)

[edit] Anecdote

Don't even think about using +--- in a WP article! :-/ ---CH 02:09, 25 May 2006 (UTC)

Simple example: charge of electron

[edit] Story

I'm not convinced that it's necessary to include the (fairly long) story about Einstein, Veblen and the sign convention. Surely the story could be summarised in a few sentences while giving a weblink or some other ref. to the actual story. MP (talk) 06:52, 27 June 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Curvature

The contraction of the Riemann Tensor is wrong for $R_{ab} \, = R^c{}_{cab}$ , since this yields zero due to the anti-symmetry of the Riemann tensor. I'm changing it to $R_{ab} \, = R^c{}_{abc}$ to be correct. Koroll (talk) 15:51, 10 June 2008 (UTC)