Talk:Spacetime/Archive 14

Limitations of different browsers

@Geoffrey.landis: I notice that you object to the loose usage adopted by many authors of using x, y, z when what is really meant is Δx, Δy, Δz. That's perfectly fine with me, because I have bounced back and forth on this point myself. But I will be modifying your edits to use math markup.

Please note the inconsistent behavior of various browsers.

• Most Chrome users, for instance, experience a thin font that is extremely fast to render (adding to Chrome's reputation for speed), but which can be awful to read especially when one has subscripts and superscripts, and as for Italics, ugh!
• MediaWiki handles Microsoft Edge very poorly in some scenarios involving Latex at reduced size.
• Safari on phones does not handle reduced size well.
• The Wikipedia mobile interface on phones is a different beast altogether.

My seemingly totally inconsistent use of HTML versus Latex largely has to do with trying to find appropriate compromises between fast rendering and good appearance. Too much math markup makes the page render very slowly. But on the other hand, HTML sometimes looks awful, especially on Chrome.

Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 23:12, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

Approximately 42% of the readers of Spacetime are reading the article using a mobile device. Remember that. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 23:15, 7 July 2017 (UTC)

I thought I was the only one who cared about crazy-fine details like this sort. I’ll accede to your judgement on the best trade-offs since it is clearly a labor of love. Greg L (talk) 19:33, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Re my ≈ 42% figure: See the PageViews tool https://tools.wmflabs.org/pageviews/?project=en.wikipedia.org&platform=all-access&agent=user&range=latest-20&pages=Spacetime

Select different platforms to see the numbers. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 03:44, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

Understanding our target readership

I think it is important to keep in mind and coordinate on who our target readership is as we go forward on this article. Material I write for guys with slide rules is very different from that for managers. Furthermore, content written for a diverse crowd (like a general interest encyclopedia) must have a much greater range to its difficulty level; the initial portions must be informative and interesting for beginners while allowing advanced readers to wade further to material they find informative.

It’s also crucial to consider the likely (middle of the bell curve) level of familiarity the target readership has with the lingo and background of a given art. Someone who is visiting our Trombone article is usually already familiar with musical concepts like “pitch” and “notes.”

Because Wikipedia is a general interest encyclopedia directed to a diverse readership, here are some principles I believe we should keep in mind as it relates to an exceedingly technical subject like spacetime:

1. The average age of a Wikipedia reader is 36 years, ranging from 14 to 92.
   
   
2. Wikipedia's pithy and succinct ledes (the opening paragraphs before the index) are one of the features that makes Wikipedia so popular. Readers driving to the library and digging out an Encyclopedia Britannica can be expected to wade a long ways into the article whereas an Internet-based readership has a large portion of an attention deficit crowd who wade no further than our ledes.
   
   
3. Ledes should clearly explain the subject so that the reader is prepared for the greater level of detail that follows. Ledes should establish significance and be written in a way that makes readers want to know more. Ledes should answer two questions for the nonspecialist reader: “What is the subject?” and “Why is this subject distinctive and notable?”
   
   
4. Because our readership is so diverse, it is important that not only should the entire article start out simply (made as accessible as possible), but—particularly in the early sections—individual sections should be as accessible as practicable in the early paragraphs, carefully transitioning to increasing difficulty within the section.
   
   
5. Keep it simple. We are writing only for non-experts; true experts in any given subject matter don’t come to Wikipedia to learn anything. I’ve corresponded with Ph.D.s who published papers I had cited in various Wikipedia articles and quickly found they had zero interest in Wikipedia; in fact, they were incredulous that someone would waste their time contributing to a project where 16-year-old kids could revert your material. With two-thirds of my patents in PEM fuel cells, I can attest that a long time ago, I once scrolled through our article on that subject… just to see how long it was; I didn’t read a word of it and have zero interest in it.
   
   
6. As regards the Spacetime article, we can assume that the middle-of-the-bell-curve reader (the mode, mean, and median) is already familiar with Einstein and the basics of his Theory of Special Relativity, and has come here to understand what is distinctive about spacetime.

Greg L (talk) 18:52, 8 July 2017 (UTC)

Dissenting opinion

I do not want to let the above stand as if its content as a whole were based on general consensus. I do neither agree to the semi-educated, unsourced pseudo-statistics, nor to the claims about the "non-expert, potential readers" of Wikipedia.

I consider this to be just another (text-) wall, intended to prohibit contributions from outside the editor's narrow scenery. Purgy (talk) 07:52, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm. With language like “semi-educated”, you’re obviously just trying to ‘mix it up’ and be nothing but provocative. Before trying to be inflammatory on the project, I suggest you think twice before weighing in when you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.

I linked the statistic about the age of our readership; it’s from Mani Pande of the Wikimedia Foundation. You can complain to him about his “pseudo-statistics.” Tell him Purgy knows better.

As for what ledes are supposed to accomplish, that came right out of Wikipedia:Writing better articles. And if you think published Ph.D. experts come to Wikipedia to read up on the latest & greatest truths of their art, you go find one who does that.

Finally, my suggestion that we ‘write for the target readership’ is common-sense stuff that comes from Technical Writing 101.

If you want to be constructive to the project, you can consider User:Stigmatella aurantiaca’s offer (∆ edit here): You've made some good suggestions in the past, but English does not appear to be your native language. So I've taken your suggested changes here where you and User:Greg L can work on them together. Hope you don't mind too much?.

That was a perfectly reasonable and generous offer for us to devote extra amounts of our all-volunteer time to assist you in contributing. But all we received from you was yet another of your protests where you complained (∆ edit here) that you have problems with four editors here, which amounts to pretty much every single contributor who was active on this page! The other passengers on a plane tend to be disinclined to see your point of view when you’re trying to open the cabin door mid-flight while complaining that everyone is out to get you.

Your persistent sniping here is bordering on being nothing but disruptive. I suggest you take this English idiom under advisement: you best let it go. You wrote earlier that you had done so (“Therefore, I walk away from the carcass of this discussion like from beating a dead horse”) but temptation seems to have gotten the better of you. Greg L (talk) 15:43, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

Genesis of the spacetime concept

@Schlafly: @Greg L: @Geoffrey.landis:

Schlafly is correct in his latest edit. The history of special relativity and the history of spacetime take a branch-and-merge somewhere around Lorentz and Poincare. Minkowski actually began work on his ideas about spacetime before 1905, and was stunned by Einstein's 1905 publication, since it expressed various conclusions that Minkowski had already (privately) arrived at concerning such things as the meaning of local time etc. Although he felt scooped, Minkowski never attempted to claim priority, and was always generous in giving Einstein credit. He did, however, think that Einstein's kinematic presentation was klunky.

I'm working to re-introduce some of the historical background that Geoffrey deleted since he wished to give more emphasis to spacetime as opposed to special relativity. This weekend has been busy, however... Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 12:38, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

I saw the edit and assumed it was correct. Thanks for confirming. Greg L (talk) 15:33, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

P.S. @Stigmatella aurantiaca: Historical tidbits such as what you wrote above about Minkowski easily passes a simple Technical Writing 101 grin test as being informative and interesting for the target readership. That clearly belongs in the historical section and should be restored. The previous version of the historical section may have been a bit long, but if someone is getting tired of reading that section, they can skip it.

Geoffrey’s edit, which pruned the History section down to its roots in order to “give more emphasis to spacetime as opposed to special relativity,” makes zero sense to me and is far from an improvement. Almost everyone who is interested in reading the History section will already have a general familiarity (or want to be familiar) with the basic principles of special relativity (maybe general relativity too), and will be interested in learning how the various theories paralleled each other and pollinated each other.

That Minkowski had been one of the profs for a 16-year-old Einstein was an interesting tidbit I added to the lede specifically because it was germane to the objective for all of Wikipedia's ledes: Ledes should establish significance and be written in a way that makes readers want to know more. Going forward, the historical relationship of how Minkowski fits relative to other significant Lorentz/Einstein/spacetime events begs to be fleshed out in an interesting way in the History section.

My most general advise would be to restore roughly two-thirds of what had previously been there, and arrange it in a semi-chronological fashion (you’ve seen movies and documentaries adopt that kind of flow presentation) so that important “elevator ride” nuggets like what you wrote here on this thread appear early in the section, and really ‘detaily’ stuff that is harder to remember appears later. Greg L (talk) 22:50, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

PPS: I'd be happy to collaborate in detail on a History section within a green-div here on this page. That is, unless you’ve had an epiphany on a sweet way to do it. Greg L (talk) 00:19, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

If you could work on this, I'd much appreciate it. My wife fell down and is currently nearly bedridden, so the amount of time that I can spend on this subject is somewhat limited, between trips to the doctor, taking her to physical therapy, going to my regular job, etc. I've been somewhat overwhelmed these last few weeks.

Disentangling the numerous threads of "who believed what and when" is very complex. The reason, of course, is that many researchers were hot on the trail of what was ultimately to be special relativity, and most historians agree that if Einstein hadn't been first, someone else would have arrived at the same conclusions within a very few years at most. Two highly useful sources on Minkowski's contributions are

• Space and Time: Minkowski’s Papers on Relativity. Petkov, Vesselin (ed) (Webcite archive) original URL http://rgs.vniims.ru/books/spacetime.pdf
• Max Born, Albert Einstein and Hermann Minkowski's Space-Time Formalism of Special Relativity, by Galina Weinstein

One should be very careful of how one interpret's Minkowski's statement to Born that I had quoted to you before, because (1) local time is only one of a number of issues dealt with by Einstein in his 1905 paper, and (2) Poincare had already made statements to that effect, so I'm puzzled because, so far as I can tell (beware of wp:OR on my part!) Minkowski should have stated that he had been scooped by Poincare on this point, not Einstein(!!!) Then there is the matter of Sommerfeld's redaction of Minkowski's 1907 article for its posthumous 1915 publication, which muddies the waters a lot. In addition, Minkowski continued to use the word "ether" until shortly before he died. There are contradictory viewpoints on how much Minkowski truly understood of the import of Einstein's contributions, etc etc. Stigmatella aurantiaca (talk) 03:12, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

@Stigmatella aurantiaca: I’m very sorry to hear about your wife. I hope she recovers quickly.

I could help you with the French-like presentation of the meal, but on material of this nature, I’d screw up (big time) if I tried my hand at an original recipe. This is supposed to be a hobby that’s enjoyable for you. Anything and everything here can wait until real life for you gets a tad monotonous and you actually look forward to getting back into the kitchen to mix up a little something special.

If someone else here doesn’t step in and do some magic with the History section, what I might do is look over the previous version of it and see if I can jigger it. Greg L (talk) 04:59, 10 July 2017 (UTC)

It is a mistake to have so much on Einstein in the introductory sections. He had very little to do with the concept of spacetime. There are separate articles on the history of relativity.

Some of what is there is not quite right. Transformations mixing space and time predate the 20th century and Einstein. So did the constant speed of light. Saying that Einstein's 1905 paper was a breakthrough over Lorentz and Poincare is debatable, and not really relevant to spacetime. It would be more relevant to say whether Minkowski's work was a breakthrough, but there is no need to insert historical opinions here anyway. Roger (talk) 05:03, 12 July 2017 (UTC)