Cirosantilli2

Name: Ciro Santilli

Homepage: https://cirosantilli.com

Proof: https://cirosantilli.com/accounts

Sponsor me: https://cirosantilli.com/sponsor

My contributions: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Cirosantilli2

My Commons account: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Cirosantilli2

List of Commons uploads: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:ListFiles/Cirosantilli2

I'm building a Wikipedia-like website where you can have multiple versions of each article at: https://ourbigbook.com with the intention of solving natural science textbooks. I later learned that Google tried a similar thing in 2008: Knol, but it shut down in 2012. Ominous.

I do two things on Wikipedia:

• edit the biographies of scientists and engineers, and the history of science and technology
• create media: mathematical plots and photos of scientific equipment, and-or find videos of experiments and add them to Wikipedia pages when appropriate

I stay away from technical text edits due to the risk of reversal and edit wars. This is the main reason why I believe that it will forever be impossible to teach and learn natural sciences on Wikipedia: https://ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/it-is-not-possible-to-teach-natural-sciences-on-wikipedia

I'm the same user as: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ciro.santilli but I lost my password. That account was super old from before I even had a Gmail, and as a result I don't even know what email I used for it to recover.

Ciro Santilli

It's usually me! https://cirosantilli.com/ciro-santilli-s-homonyms

cirosantilli

It's usually me! https://cirosantilli.com/accounts

Cool edits

2024

This year's work is "funded" by a crazy 1000 Monero donation: https://cirosantilli.com/sponsor#1000-monero-donation plus some other smaller donations from amazing people.

Falun Mine: added a section about the relationship between the discovery of chemical elements and the mine:

The chemical element tantalum was first discovered in 1802 by Anders Ekeberg in samples coming from Falun and England.

Selenium was initially discovered and isolated in 1817 by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Johann Gottlieb Gahn as an impurity of pyrite coming from the Falun mine that had been used in sulfuric acid production.

In 1815, Berzelius thought he had discovered a new element from an ore coming from Falun, and chose the name Thorium for it. He later noticed that he had been mistaken, and that the substance was yttrium phosphate rather than a new element. When he actually discovered what is now known as thorium in 1928, he reused the name for the new discovery.

Nils Gabriel Sefström, discoverer of vanadium and Johan Gottlieb Gahn, discoverer of manganese both lived in Falun at certain points in their lives.

Marie Curie: cite both her polonium and radium papers and quote them naming the elements

If the existence of this new metal is confirmed, we propose to call it polonium, after the country of origin of one of us.

The various reasons we have just listed lead us to believe that the new radioactive substance contains a new element, which we propose to give the name radium.

Solenoid: explain the etymology of the word and add a good pre-existing demo video the page

2023

Max vonx Laue experiment X-ray crystallography § X-ray diffraction: uploaded and added to wiki pages experiment picture from the original paper, now in the public domain. Also uploaded paper and all pictures to: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Interferenz-Erscheinungen_bei_Röntgenstrahlen:

Davisson–Germer experiment add picture of a figure of the paper now that it is in the public domain. Learning how to rip stuff from old papers from the amazing archive.org scans.

Josephson effect § History: supercharge section a bit with Josephson's motivations

In 1962 Brian Josephson became interested into superconducting tunneling. He was then 23-year-old and a second year graduate student of Brian Pippard at the Mond Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. On that year, Josephson took a many-body theory course with Philip W. Anderson, a Bell Labs employee on sabbatical leave for the 1961–1962 academic year. The course introduced Josephson to the idea of broken symmetry in superconductors, and he "was fascinated by the idea of broken symmetry, and wondered whether there could be any way of observing it experimentally.". Josephson studied the experiments by Ivar Giaever and Hans Meissner, and theoretical work by Robert Parmenter. Pippard initially believed that the tunneling effect was possible but that it would be too small to be noticeable, but Josephson did not agree, especially after Anderson introduced him to a preprint of "Superconductive Tunneling" by Cohen, Falicov, and Phillips about the superconductor-barrier-normal metal system.

Josephson and his colleagues were initially unsure about the validity of Josephson's calculations. Anderson later remembered:

We were all—Josephson, Pippard and myself, as well as various other people who also habitually sat at the Mond tea and participated in the discussions of the next few weeks—very much puzzled by the meaning of the fact that the current depends on the phase.

After further review, they concluded that Josephson's results were valid he submitted "Possible new effects in superconductive tunnelling" to Physics Letters on June 1962. The newer journal Physics Letters was chosen instead of the better established Physical Review Letters due to their uncertainty about the results. John Bardeen, by then already Nobel Prize winner, was initially publicly skeptical of Josephson's theory in 1962, but came to accept it after further experiments and theoretical clarifications. See also: John Bardeen § Josephson Effect controversy.

John Bardeen § Josephson effect controversy: create epic section, based mostly on True Genius: The Life and Science of John Bardeen by Lillian Hoddeson and Vicki Daitch

Bardeen became interested in superconducting tunnelling in the summer of 1960 after consulting for the General Electric Research Laboratory in Schenectady, New York where he learned about experiments done by Ivar Giaever at the Rennselaer Polytechnic Institute which suggested that electrons from a normal material could tunnel into a superconducting one.

In June 8, 1962, Brian Josephson, then 23, submitted to Physics Letters his prediction of a super-current flow across a barrier, effect which later became known as the Josephson effect. Bardeen challenged Josephson's theory on a note in his own paper received ten days later by Physical Review Letters:

In a recent note, Josephson uses a somewhat similar formulation to discuss the possibility of superfluid flow across the tunneling region, in which no quasi-particles are created. However, as pointed out by the author (reference 3), pairing does not extend into the barrier, so that there can be no such

The matter was further discussed on the 8th International Conference on Low Temperature Physics held September 16 to 22, 1962 at Queen Mary University of London. While Josephson was presenting his theory, Bardeen rose to describe his objections. After an intense debate both men were unable to reach a common understanding, and at points Josephson repeatedly asked Bardeen, "Did you calculate it? No? I did."

In 1963, experimental evidence and further theoretical clarifications were discovered supporting the Josephson effect, notably in a paper by Philip W. Anderson and John Rowell from Bell Labs. After this, Bardeen came to accept Josephson's theory and publicly withdrew his previous opposition to it at a conference held in August 1963. Bardeen also invited Josephson as a postdoc in Illinois for the academic year of 1965–1966, and later nominate Josephson and Giaever for the Nobel Prize in Physics, which they received in 1973.

Discrete Fourier transform: added this graph

John Bardeen: epic scheme to nominate himself to his second Nobel Prize

In the late 1960s, Bardeen felt that was Cooper and Schrieffer deserved the Nobel prize for BCS. He was concerned that they might not be awarded because of the Nobel Committee's reticence to award the same person twice, which would be his case as a co-author of the theory. Bardeen nominated scientists who worked on superconducting tunneling effects such as the Josephson effect for the prize in 1967: Leo Esaki, Ivar Giaever and Brian Josephson. He recognized that because the tunneling developments depended on superconductivity, it would increase the chances that BCS itself would be awarded first. He also reasoned that the Nobel Committee had a predilection for multinational teams, which was the case for his tunneling nominees, each being from a different country. Bardeen renewed the nominations in 1971, 1972, when BCS received the prize, and finally 1973, when tunneling was awarded.

2022

Scott Hassan: created the page of this early Googler. This led to a small edit war with Hassan's puppets to remove the messy details of his divorce. It was finally decided that they should be left out as per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Biographies_of_living_persons and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Who_is_a_low-profile_individual

I also greatly expanded on several other important details of Google's early days:

Page and Brin initially approached David Cheriton for advice because he had a nearby office in Stanford, and they knew he had startup experience, having recently sold the company he co-founded, Granite Systems, to Cisco. David arranged a the meeting with his Granite co-founder Andy Bechtolsheim on his porch. The meeting was set for 8 AM and it had to be brief because Andy had another meeting at Cisco, where he now worked after the acquisition, at 9 AM. Andy briefly tested a demo of the website, liked what he saw, and then went back to his car to grab the check. David Cheriton later also joined in with an $250,000 investment.

Page and Brin had first approached Shriram, who was a venture capitalist, for funding and council, and Shiram invested 250,000$ in Google on February of 1998. Shiram knew Bezos because Amazon had acquired Junglee, at which Shiram was the president. It was Shiram who told Bezos about Google. Bezos asked Shiram to meet Google's founders, and the met 6 months after Shiram's had made his investment, when Bezos and his wife where in a vacation trip to the Bay Area. Google's initial funding round had already formally closed, but Bezos' status as CEO of Amazon was enough to persuade Page and Brin to extend the round and accept his investment.

Additionally, in 2001 Google's Investors felt the need to have a strong internal management, and they agreed to hire Eric Schmidt as the chairman and CEO of Google. Eric was proposed by John Doerr from Kleiner Perkins. He had been trying to find a CEO that Sergey and Larry would accept for several months, but they rejected several candidates because they wanted to retain control over the company. Michael Moritz from Sequoia Capital at one point even menaced requesting Google to immediately pay back Sequoia's $12.5m investment if they did not fulfill their promise to hire a chief executive office, which had been made verbally during investment negotiations. Eric wasn't initially enthusiastic about joining Google either, as the company's full potential hadn't yet been widely recognized at the time, and as he was occupied with his responsibilities at Novell where he was CEO. As part of him joining, Eric agreed to buy $1 million of Google preferred stocks as a way to show his commitment and to provide funds Google needed.

NIST Post-Quantum Cryptography Standardization

SIKE broken on classical computer on phase 4 of the NIST process!

Seymour Cray: clarify his wives a bit

Cray married Verene Voll in 1947. They had known each other since childhood. She was the daughter of a Methodist minister, just as was Cray's mother, and Verene worked as a nutritionist. They divorced around 1978.

2021

Enrico Fermi: add some cool notes on his childhood and help from his mentor Amidei

At a local market in Campo de' Fiori Fermi found a physics book, the 900-page Elementorum physicae mathematicae. Written in Latin by Jesuit Father Andrea Caraffa, a professor at the Collegio Romano, it presented mathematics, classical mechanics, astronomy, optics, and acoustics as they were understood at the time of its 1840 publication. With a scientifically inclined friend, Enrico Persico, Fermi pursued projects such as building gyroscopes and measuring the acceleration of Earth's gravity.

In 1914, Fermi, who used to often meet with his father in front of the office after work, met a colleague of his father called Adolfo Amidei, who would walk part of the way home with Alberto. Enrico had learned that Adolfo was interested in mathematics and physics, and took the opportunity to a question about geometry to Adolfo, who understood that the young Fermi was referring to projective geometry, and then proceeded to give him a book on the subject written by Theodor Reye. Two months later, Fermi returned the book, having solved all problems proposed at the end of the book, some of which Adolfo considered difficult. Upon verifying this, Adolfo felt that Fermi was "a prodigy, at least with respect to geometry", and further mentored the boy, providing him more books on physics and mathematics. Adolfo noted that Fermi had a very good memory, and could return the books after having red them, because he could remember their content very well.

GCHQ: why the GCHQ is in Cheltenham

One of the major reasons why Cheltenham was selected was because it had been the location of the headquarters of the United States Army Services of Supply for the European Theater during the War, which built up a telecommunications infrastructure in the region to carry out its logistics tasks.

Julian Schwinger: create the early life and career section

Schwinger was a precocious student. He attended the Townsend Harris High School from 1932 to 1934, a highly regarded high school for gifted students at the time. During high school, Julian had already started reading Physical Review papers by authors such as Paul Dirac in the library of the City College of New York, in whose campus Townsend Harris was then located.

In the fall of 1934, Schwinger entered the City College of New York as an undergraduate. CCNY automatically accepted all Townsend Harris graduates at the time, and both institutions offered free tuition. Due to his intense interest in physics and mathematics, Julian performed very well in those subjects despite often skipping classes and learning directly from books. On the other hand, his lack of interest for other topics such as English led to academic conflicts with teachers of those subjects.

After Julian had joined CCNY, his brother Harold, who had previously graduated from CCNY, asked his ex-classmate Lloyd Motz to "get to know [Julian]". Lloyd was a CCNY physics instructor and Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University at the time. Lloyd made the acquaintance, and soon recognized Julian's talent. Noticing Schwinger's academic problems, Lloyd decided to ask Isidor Isaac Rabi who he knew at Columbia for help. Rabi also immediately recognized Schwinger's capabilities on their first meeting, and then made arrangements to award Schwinger with a scholarship to study at Colombia. At first Julian's bad grades in some subjects at CCNY prevented the scholarship award. But Rabi persisted and showed an unpublished paper on quantum electrodynamics written by Schwinger to Hans Bethe, who happened to be passing by New York. Bethe's approval of the paper and his reputation in that domain were then enough to secure the scholarship for Julian, who then transferred to Columbia. His academic situation at Columbia was much better than at CCNY and he received his B.A. in 1936.

During Schwinger's graduate studies, Rabi felt that it would be good for Julian to visit other institutions around the country, and Julian was awarded a travelling fellowship for the year 37/38 which he spent at working with Gregory Breit and Eugene Wigner. During this time, Schwinger, who previously had already had the habit of working until late at night, went further and made the day/night switch more complete, working at night and sleeping during the day, a habit he would carry throughout his career. Schwinger later commented that this switch was in part a way to retain greater intellectual independence and avoid being "dominated" by Breit and Wigner.

Schwinger obtained his PhD overseen by Rabi in 1939 at the age of 21.

During the fall of 1939 Schwinger started working at the University of California, Berkeley under J. Robert Oppenheimer, where he stayed for two years as an NRC fellow.

Tachyon: I created a spacetime diagram showing that faster than light travel implies traveling back in time!

Freeman Dyson: cool sports annecdotes from Cambridge

During this stay, Dyson also practiced Night climbing on the university buildings, and once walked from Cambridge to London in a single day together with his friend Oscar Hahn, nephew of Kurt Hahn, who was a wheelchair user due to polio.

2020

Fundamental theorem on homomorphisms added a version of this diagram there. Also tried at: Isomorphism_theorems but got reverted: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Isomorphism_theorems#File:Diagram_of_the_fundamental_theorem_on_homomorphisms and I didn't fight.

Dirac equation: gave explicit formulation as a system of 4 PDEs

$i\partial _{t}{\begin{bmatrix}\psi _{1}\\\psi _{2}\\\psi _{3}\\\psi _{4}\end{bmatrix}}=-i\partial _{x}{\begin{bmatrix}\psi _{4}\\\psi _{3}\\\psi _{2}\\\psi _{1}\end{bmatrix}}+i\partial _{y}{\begin{bmatrix}-\psi _{4}\\\psi _{3}\\-\psi _{2}\\\psi _{1}\end{bmatrix}}-i\partial _{z}{\begin{bmatrix}\psi _{3}\\\psi _{2}\\\psi _{3}\\\psi _{4}\end{bmatrix}}+m{\begin{bmatrix}\psi _{1}\\\psi _{2}\\\psi _{3}\\\psi _{4}\end{bmatrix}}$

Jingjing and Chacha: brought their copyrighted images back to life on Wikipedia with fair use after they had been moved to Commons and then deleted because not open license

2019

Illumina, Inc.: added some images of their sequencers:

Oxford Nanopore Technologies: the most photogenic hand of all time

Gel electrophoresis: add comb image

Magnetic separation: image of DNA purification with beads

500px: add video of Vortex-Genie 2 running

Cool media

Pachelbel's Canon synthesis in plain C: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/732699/how-is-audio-represented-with-numbers-in-computers/36510894#36510894

Testing

Citation reuse

https://www.quora.com/On-Wikipedia-how-can-you-cite-the-same-source-more-than-once-without-them-becoming-separate-references

The citation system in Wikipedia is really insane, learning it takes about as much effort as learning a new programming language!

Named ref definition: .

Named ref reuse: . Best method if you are citing the exact same thing, usually a website.

Named ref different page with r: . Best method if you are citing another page of the thing.

Named ref different page with rp: This can be useful to set a page to the point that defines it. On usage point just use r instead.

Short references. It is hard to understand how those work at all! What do they link to? And how to you mach the hit under "Notes" to the hit under "References"? Insane. From their example: but the Moon is not so big. The Sun is also quite hot.

sfn. This method is better than raw short references because at least you get a link from the reflist to the cite. From their example: Article text. More article text. Still more article text.

Cite book with page and name it: This is a bad idea because the page will remain on every other usage.

Cite book reuse with r without page: . The original page still appears on hover, which is why it is a bad idea

Cite book reuse with r with page: . The original page still appears on hover, and the new page as ":123: without hover.

Create and cite book without hardcoding the page: .

Use book without hardcoded page: .

Use book with chapter: .

Code

Inline code? print("hello world")

References

• Brown, Rebecca (2006). "Size of the Moon", Scientific American, 51 (78).
• Miller, Edward (2005). The Sun. Academic Press.
• Smith, John (2020). Smith's Book.