Wikipedia:Votes for deletion/Topological Geometrodynamics

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[edit] Topological Geometrodynamics

From looking at the links provided and the editing history of the page, it looks like the page's creator is the only person doing research on this theory. The page Wikipedia:No original research states that "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it doesn't belong in Wikipedia (except perhaps in some ancilliary article), regardless if it's true or not, whether you can prove it or not". That seems to apply here. --Steuard 19:56, Oct 7, 2004 (UTC)

  • delete - as Steuard says. I added a note to the authors talk page but no reply (William M. Connolley 20:06, 7 Oct 2004 (UTC)).
  • Delete. Original research. This is an unrecognized/ignored research program carried on only by the author. -- Fropuff 19:27, 2004 Oct 11 (UTC)
For reference, here's the Spires publication search for this author that you cited at the VfD page for Matti Pitkanen, showing that all listed citations of "TGD" were in his own papers.--Steuard 16:48, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)
A most interesting remark against your own stance. In that particular search engine Pitkänen has 31 entries as you say. Albert Einstein has 32, one by another citing author. And Karl Pribram has none. Please don't use specious arguments. --200.108.74.2 16:37, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Two points: first, I firmly believe that any decision of this sort should be based on the most complete information available. Given that, I think that providing a link to the SPIRES search is worthwhile whether it supports my position or not. Second, the point under discussion here is not whether Mr. Pitkänen's theory is correct or how prolific he has been, it is whether his view "is held by an extremely small minority". The SPIRES database shows that "TGD" has been cited in almost no "high-energy physics related articles" except for those written by Mr. Pitkänen himself. (One of his articles was cited by a single other author three times; I missed that when I first looked through the results, and I apologize for that mistake. An apparent citation by a second other author seems to have been a typographical error on their part.) Given that "TGD" is billed as an extension of string theory (which is heavily indexed in SPIRES), I would expect at least some evidence of active interest or involvement by other scientists to appear in that database if the theory had a broad following. Again, I'm not arguing here that "TGD" is wrong or that Mr. Pitkänen should be prevented from working on it, I'm just arguing that the theory doesn't fit the stated inclusion policy of Wikipedia. (Oh: now I notice that the page has already been deleted. My apologies for beating a dead horse; I figure I'll leave this response here since it's already done.)--Steuard 19:43, Oct 18, 2004 (UTC)
  • Not delete The page now offers a useful synopsis of topological geometrodynamics and some views of Pitkänen that is clearer and more instructive than his other papers. I don´t endorse the overview but find it useful and proper of an encyclopedia, specially for the mathematical treatment of spacetime. IMO, new links should be added and professor Pitkänen shouldn´t cram further material in it. ´´Marcel´´--209.13.231.33 18:51, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Not delete --200.69.51.74 23:30, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • A strong keep. There's a difference between "only one person knows a lot about this now" and "this is a topic only one person would care to learn about." A well written article. --L33tminion 19:59, Oct 12, 2004 (UTC)
While the article does seem reasonably well written, the point remains that its subject simply is not notable enough to be included in a general encyclopedia at this point. Those who wish to learn more about "TGD" are welcome to visit Mr. Pitkänen's website.--Steuard 16:48, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)
Are you seriously proposing to send all the Wikipedia's readers to the primary sources? This means shutting down the encyclopedia... The entry is a synoptic notice of the sources you mention and others which you revealed yourself to all of us, such as Pitkänen's many papers in the Int. J. Theor. Physics and Annalen Phys., his Ph.D. Thesis at Helsinki Univ. with hardcopy at Fermilab, and his Helsinki Univ. 450-page book. All of the latter surfaced thanks to your spontaneous mentioning here the Spires publication search for this author --200.69.51.74 16:56, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Delete. Original research. --French Tourist 20:31, 12 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • NON DELETE. I agree that the article provides a valuable introduction to Topological Geometrodynamics. --211.26.33.123 01:32, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Not delete - vote of a Professional Industrial Mathematician, former US(A) NSF Graduate Fellow. Few people know ANYTHING about p-adic numbers, and fewer still of those who do could imagine such a creative purpose for their existence. In every Great IDEA and every Brilliant Application, there is a first, and this first is often most strenuously resisted by the fossilized thinking of the intellectual establishment, as Thomas Kuhn has extensively shown. Publication of such a first is often denied. While many Great Ideas eventually become passe or regarded as insufficient to proposed purpose, the life of culture is enriched nonetheless by their passage through time, So can be seen in the many errors of Greek Philosophy - for instance in the misapprehension of Vision as projection rather than a result of reception, and even Young with his 'three colors' still missed the point of immense processing which our minds in brains most swiftly and usually correctly make in identifying the objects of our seen experience. Such ideas if later found wrong remain as sign posts of human insight on the nature of life. I think it most appropriate that Wikipedia has given a home for the incubation of MP's p-adic application to both physical existence and consciousness, that others may be exposed to this most surprising juxtaposition. swimp@shaw.ca
  • Not delete - Not so original, either in terms 'topology' or 'geometrodynamics'. Wheeler has written book in 'geometrodynamics' some decades ago, though the writer is a frontier in this area. If nobody cares on this issue doesn't mean this idea itself is not right -- though I'm not also the expert of this stuff. vxianto@yahoo.com

Please note that votes from anonymous contributors and from contributors who created User IDs after this listing are not counted. RickK 07:48, Oct 13, 2004 (UTC)

  • I think this should be kept. Yes, it is the idea of one man. But he is a Professor. And I don't see anything wrong with including report of the work of individual academics, provided they are respected in their field as having some clue -- i.e. even if most other researchers think they are wrong, if their views are considered worthy of consideration by the scientific community, as opposed to quackery or psuedoscience, we should keep them. Wiki is not paper. --137.111.13.34 10:27, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
This individual is certainly not considered respected in [his] field as having some clue - see his own complaints on http://www.physics.helsinki.fi/~matpitka/newdiary.html
Physicists continue to be intensely silent about TGD. I cannot even dream of publishing anything about TGD in physics journals. However, I am not anymore the only one talking about the catastrophical state of the peer review institution in physics. (...) Also in Finland colleagues have become worried about the painful fact that TGD is gradually diffusing through the censoring layers of establishment. etc... --French Tourist 10:33, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)

--200.108.74.2 15:45, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC) Non delete. I chanced to met this voting page and went much concerned about RickK's elitist admonition that "votes from anonymous contributors and from contributors who created User IDs after this listing are not counted." What does 'anonymous' mean? How could I prove my unbiasing and professional idoneity? Does a Wikipedia's "User ID" do it? I chose to remain unregistered because my machine doesn't receive cookies: does it turns me a second-class user? Gerrymandering districts to bias voting is a spatial manipulation and - not improperly among experts in mathematical physics - this looks to me as an attempt to manipulate time, by cutting out votes after certain date and machine settings. Maybe a neutral assessment helps, since French Tourist wields an ancient User ID but her/his second intervention clearly incurred in argumentum ad hominen in her/his determination to ban this article out.

With this in view I visited the reference provided by French Tourist and found several things. On one hand, Pitkanen managed his local (Finland) confrontations badly by insisting in his being victimized and we cannot ascertain who threw the first stone - but it is not our present job. Secondly, Pitkanen mixed TGD with his views on mind and this might have offended some Finnish academicians, but in the Wikipedia recension the topic is well presented and its philosophical affinities (which I don't share) declared outright. Thirdly, topological geometrodynamics is a subject of much interest in itself and had its primary publications in Finnish - Pitkanen's academic work. Keeping this article about such a work hidden away in another language is thus a service to Wikipedia readers. Besides, I don't like that censors care for what I shouldn't read. Finally, it clearly is false that the TGD WK entry, as it stands, is "original work": it carries no formulae, so clearly is not the original mathematical work. The latter is published, both in Finnish and by Internet pages; it is rather known in the foreign, particularly in South America where some seminars took it as a subject, and is not a personal viewpoint but a multipaper report of some mathematical relationships of interest. Moreover, the WK article is quite well crafted and informative - I find no grounds for deletion or modification, not even of the philosophy of mind section which I strongly disagree with.

  • delete -- Decumanus 16:52, 2004 Oct 13 (UTC)
  • I strong urge KEEPING the entry (NON-DELETION). Matti's work has already been cited (by myself included - in a poster presented at the Towards a Science of Consciousness 2004 Conference at the University of Tucson, Arizona, USA) and thus has entered the body of current discourse on the science, math, physics, paraphysics and metaphysics of consciousness. I thought the whole purpose of Wikipedia was for scholars to be able to find things online. Matti's work, is of course based on the work of those who have inspired him. Thus knowledge feeds appropriately on itself. Wandsqueen 22:00, 2004 Oct 13
  • Delete. Clearly original research. Not yet notable (might be in future, but that's irrelevant in VfD). Here are some selected subtitles taken from Matti Pitkänen's papers in his home page, to give a clue of what kind theory of everything he is building: Mother Gaia Hypothesis in TGD Universe, Homeopathy in many-sheeted space-time, Explanation of super-luminal velocities in terms of remote metabolism, Fatima Marian apparitions and TGD inspired theory of consciousness, Crop circles and life at parallel space-time sheets, Are aliens intraterrestrials (ITs)?, UFOs as plasmoids?, Semitrance and mental disorders, Quantum model for paranormal phenomena, Healing by time reversal etc. etc. Luckily we have peer review here in Wikipedia, just like in scientific community. jni 16:06, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Please do list also the many-many writings by Isaac Newton on alchemy, "magicks" transmutations and spirits - far bulkier than his scientific papers. Are you trying to propose HM the Queen to knight Pitkäanen? Or, perchance, are you trying to discriminate him away upon his private faith? What does stand behind this remarkable deletion page? We are judging a WK entry, not how a certain individual does personally steer his own intellectual itinerary, or which his religion is. The grounds for deleting this entry are heretofore non-neutral and in my view your vote shows it clearly. So please back to the main track. The entry is good, valuable and insight-promoting; we shouldn't care if, like many brilliant British academicians at the turn of the nineteenth century, his author founded a spiritist society to study parapsychological abilities and try to photograph ghosts. Such are no grounds for deleting from Wikipedia this topological geometrodynamics entry based, as involuntarily Steuard revealed to us, upon Pitkänen's many papers in the Int. J. Theor. Physics and Annalen Phys., his Ph.D. Thesis at Helsinki Univ. with hardcopy at Fermilab, and his Helsinki Univ. 450-page book. All of them surfaced here not propped out by Pitkänen but referred to by Steuard's pointing ut to Spires publication search for this author. I'm growingly suspicious of prejudice against the page: keep it.--200.69.51.49 18:34, 14 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Non-Delete. I've commented on some of Matti's papers (see http://www.geocities.com/spatlavskiy OTHER PAPERS-3). My view is that the true Theory of Everything -- it is not a single theory that will satisfy everybody, but an ensemble of mutually compatible theories of different authors. (The authors are free to use their own theoretica base, the base of notions, the system of proofs, etc., but their theories must meet some general requirements.) One of such (conventionally) compatible theory is the Matti's Topological Geometrodynamics. His theory containes some meta-theoretical assertions, but the MT-level intellectual product cannot be criticised -- it can only be investigated for compatibility with another author's MT-level intellectual product (see http://www.geocities.com/titanicpsf, Theoretical background, the ADC Applied Theory). So, the question is a valid one: have the Matti's "deleters" their own intellectual products of the MT-level? Kindly, Serge Patlavskiy
  • Not Delete - I have recently completed a two-year research and writing project which has looked at problems that physicists cite (in published journals and books) with respect to physics' standard models (standard model of particle physics and standard model of cosmology). I then established a screening mechanism for examining "hidden radical theories of new physics" which address the various elements of this set of problems that physicists cite. Topological geometrodynamics was the winner of this comprehensive research project -- the Number One Hidden Radical Theory of New Physics, based on TGD's integrated solution to the entire set of problems with the standard models that were included in my screen. Dr. Pitkanen's work, as it turns out, is discussed in the most prominent contemporary forums of consciousness studies, emergent mind, nonlocal physics, and even the U. S. Department of Energy's Energy Citation Database for energy-related scientific and technical information. Topological geometrodynamics is therefore an important addition to Wikipedia's discussions of Quantum Mind and Space-time Theories of Consciousness. 141.154.39.18 00:00, 16 Oct 2004 (UTC)
  • Non-Delete. P-adic numbers and math are real enough, right? WHAT, then, is all the fuss? When curious people wonder months or years hence, "What are p-adics and how are they finding meaningful application?", Matti Pitkanen's contributions should show in the search results. -- Ralph Frost