Talk:Kinetic theory of solids

Point(s) for improvement

• Encyclopedic articles are generally written in the third person; do you think you could convert this article to that? Thanks, NW (Talk) 20:13, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
• The phrase "consider" and other such phrases imply that you are trying to have a conversation with the reader. It is best if you avoid that and instead adopt the tone of writing of, say String theory or Plastics extrusion. NW (Talk) 20:18, 15 July 2009 (UTC)
• I think the animation of the transverse wave is not an optical wave, but a transverse acoustic wave. This should be relabeled (I'd do it myself but I don't know how). —Preceding unsigned comment added by 78.86.83.158 (talk) 08:13, 17 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I removed the "acoustic" and "optical" distinction, which implied (falsely, I am sure) that "acoustic" means longitudinal and "optical" means transverse waves. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonon#Acoustic_and_optical_phonons for what I believe is the accepted use of these terms regarding phonons. Robin Whittle (talk) 12:39, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
• "great unresolved issues"?. The Introduction contains this sentence, referring, I think, to the mathematical difficulty of modelling thermal motion: "This area remains as one the great unresolved issues in the most comprehensive texts in the fields of physical chemistry, solid state physics, and thus condensed matter physics.". The sentence cites a paper (1911) and three books from 1939, 1940 and 1986. I am not querying the validity of this statement, but I think there should be a more detailed citation for it. Robin Whittle (talk) 12:48, 4 December 2010 (UTC)

Variable symbols

Could someone more familiar with the usage check out the variable symbols such as

• ν nu
• υ upsilon
• v vee (the English letter is especially hard to distinguish from nu in my page-view font, easier on my edit screen font)

as used in this article. I'm not familiar with upsilon as a frequency symbol (nu is commonly used for frequency), but perhaps some distinction that I don't notice is being made here?

Also, check consistency of x and X for compressibility and likely use a consistent symbol, and maybe also uppercase V and lowercase v.

I've changed _o to ₀ since there were several places using things such as $X_{0}$ and improperly changing to X_o in the text. Gene Nygaard (talk) 14:19, 20 July 2009 (UTC)

Absolutely right about the frequency usage. It should be a Greek 'nu' consistently. I'll see what I can do. -- logger9 (talk) 18:54, 20 July 2009 (UTC)