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Firstly, is the article about Christian, or Christian's disproof?

From the content of the article (admins can read deleted articles), it looks like Christian's work hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal. Inclusion in the arXiv does not in and of itself constitute a criterion for notability, because of its relatively lax standards for acceptance; many crackpots (please note that I am explicitly not stating that Joy Christian is a crackpot) submit their papers to the arXiv because no one else will accept them.

For something as controversial and important as someone's claim to have disproved Bell's Theorem, if the only evidence is a paper that's been submitted to the arXiv but nowhere else, then we can't accept that. I suggest you read our policies on original research.

Sorry. DS 00:08, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Bell's 'disproof'

Hi there. (Dragonfly asked me to cast an eye over this as a third party...)

First off, the Nature article is Nature Physics, and is a monthly column - it's interesting, but it's not peer-reviewed literature! A major problem is that outside of that one column, we really don't seem to have any secondary or external discussion of the paper or the argument; we're reduced to summarising and discussing the claims from primary sources alone, which rarely makes for a good encyclopedia article. In this case, we appear to be dismantling the entire paper at length, and that certainly doesn't seem appropriate for our venue - we're an encyclopedia, after all, and that's the ultimate synthesis tertiary source!

If we do cover this topic - no reason we shouldn't, in moderation - it seems substantially more appropriate to deal with it in the context of Bell's Theorem itself - this avoids the danger of having "pro and anti" pages split up, and also avoids us giving the appearance of undue significance to a single, relatively unsupported, viewpoint. (Imagine if we had seperate articles for every nitpick at general relativity...) What I'd suggest doing here is bringing the matter up on Talk:Bell's theorem - this'll give you an opportunity to discuss the matter with those more knowledgeable about the topic in general, and who can probably give you an idea of how much weight it's appropriate to give it - and then put some relatively short discussion into that page. This seems the best solution - it means we can deal with it centrally, and avoid going into too much detail, whilst also ensuring people actually see it...

I'll email you a copy of the last revision of Joy Christian: Disproof of Bell's Theorem, so you've got it if you need something to work from (or you want to publish it elsewhere), but I'm not sure that kind of detailed analysis of a single paper is really something we should be having here. Not any value judgement on his theory - looking at his past history he doesn't look too crazy - but...

Does that seem sensible? Shimgray | talk | 00:47, 15 November 2007 (UTC)

Sorry about that - we get this sort of thing surprisingly often :-) Was it you or the assessor who suggested publishing it to Wikipedia, out of interest? I'd can arrange to provide you with some kind of formal note that you posted it here (but we deleted it) if they insist on proof that you did... Shimgray | talk | 01:02, 15 November 2007 (UTC)