Wikipedia:Featured article candidates/Special relativity/archive2

Special relativity

This was nominated back in 2004 and the main objection was lack of references, which has since been fixed. Comprehensive and excellently illustrated, and although it is highly technical there is a daughter article Special relativity for beginners. Note that despite my username, I am not actually a physicist and did not contribute to this article. Redquark 04:30, 5 February 2006 (UTC)

• Object. Wikipedia guidelines state that the longer the article, the longer the introduction should be. There should be two or three solid paragraphs in introduction, not just one. Fieari 05:31, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
• Conditional Support iff Fieari's suggestion is followed up. Thethinredline 10:49, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
• Needs a copy-edit. In particular, please merge some of the stubby little paragraphs, and reword the unencycopedic expressions such as 'As we shall see'. It's not a transcription of an oral presentation, or a fireside chat. Otherwise, it has a lot going for it. The animation is ... amazing! Tony 12:08, 5 February 2006 (UTC)
• Oppose It's a fine article, I don't think it is FA material yet. Here are some brief comments, which are by no means exhaustive:

• Reading through it, there is little sense of where the article is going. One (shortish) section seems to haphazardly follow another. Some sections, like "Relativity and unifying Electromagnetism" are embarassingly small. The structure of the article really needs to be better thought out.
• The history article is poor. I don't think having a separate article is any excuse for not having a (short, but good) history section in the main article.
• I'm not sure that special relativity applies only to inertial frames of reference. Like Newtonian mechanics, it seems perfectly possible to do calculations from non-inertial frames of reference, should one desire. It sure doesn't include gravity, though.
• The section about tests ("status") of special relativity should probably be moved up and emphasized.
• The animation is very cool.

So, I think it is a good article but needs a fair amount of work to meet today's FA criteria. –Joke 16:18, 6 February 2006 (UTC)

• Support. I disagree that one paragraph for the introduction is enough to make an article lose FA status, are we really supposed to add a useless paragraph because someone arbitrarily decided this rule for Special Relativity without reading this article??? I think the structure is adequate, and the diagrams are good/excellent. I also disagree with the technical objection that Joke makes, it's not possible to do calculation in non-inertial frames, it's formally only possible to do calculations in inertial frames, and then work out what that looks like from a non-inertial frame. It's got good references. I think it's a featured article, but not suitable for the front page (too technical). I vote for.WolfKeeper 04:03, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
  • If there's enough information on the subject to have an article that's so long, there's enough information that can reasonably be placed into the introduction. Fieari 18:56, 7 February 2006 (UTC)
• Object for the following reasons:
  • "...frames in flat spacetime, where the effects of gravity can be ignored." is too complicated. Flat space time is a concept of general relativity not of special relativity.
  • "the state of inertial motion." is unclear. Why not velocity instead of this very pedantic formulation.
  • "Second postulate (invariance of c)" is a consequence of the first one. Light is an electromagnetic wave.

That's all for today. I'll have other comments later on. Vb 09:18, 8 February 2006 (UTC)

• Object Needs a copy edit and a thorough work-over by a person who cares to get English prose really, really right. The pictures, however, are great. I should note that "flat spacetime" is what distinguishes Special Relativity from General: the Minkowski metric is "flat" in a sense which does not depend upon the specific cause of curvature in General Relativity. Statements like "the difference between SR and GR is that SR does not cover accelerations" are incorrect. SR was invented to describe situations involving accelerations, like the radiation from an accelerated charge. The real distinction is that SR spacetime is flat, while GR spacetime can be curved. See Misner, Taylor and Wheeler's Gravitation (a big thick book if you ever wanted one). Furthermore, a great many textbooks treat the second postulate as an independent case from the first one. By some reasoning, I suppose one could consider it a consequence or a "special case", but it is such an important special case that most books pull it out and treat it separately. (I'm almost sure Halliday and Resnick do, for example.) Anville 08:28, 11 February 2006 (UTC)
• Object per above, needs some improvement in prose. Thanks! Flcelloguy (A note?) 17:29, 12 February 2006 (UTC)

• Strong Object While I have as of yet no edits in en:Wikipedia article space, this is an article I've been following for some time. I question the comprehensiveness of the article, especially as it barely addresses a central point that readers deserve to have answered, namely What is the value of special relativity within the context of today's theoretical physics? Furthermore, the article is not stable and is continually undergoing insertion and deletion of material with limited claims to the verifiability of such material. This leads to some subtle and sometimes rather serious biases being introduced into the article (and its ancillary articles as well). As I see it, there are three interrelated issues that should be dealt with:
  • Overall structure of the article lacks proper cohesion and direction
  • Poor separation of the physical, historical, and philosophical aspects of the subject
  • No clear attempt to base statements on the references provided (this article is crying out for in-line references)

Particluar issues and/or suggestions for improvement:

• Intro section
  • Does not correlate well with the rest of article
  • Important concepts (e.g. symmetry, Maxwell's equations) left out
  • Undefined and potentially confusing concepts (observer, material object) included
• "Lack of an absolute reference frame" section
  • Historical baggage about aether should be placed in a separate section or article
  • Could be expanded to address the concept of symmetry
• "Consequences" section
  • Claim of Einstein unsourced, potentially irrelevant to later or current 'consequences'
• "Relativistic mass" and "Force" sections
  • Notational issues not directly relevant to this article
  • Confusing and unencyclopedic, unreferenced
  • These sections should be removed
• "The geometry of space-time" and "Physics in spacetime" sections
  • Potentially valuable information presented without clear context
  • Appears too technical
  • Will benefit greatly from an overall coherent structure
• "Relativity and unifying electromagnetism" section
  • Could be merged with much needed section about symmetry
• "Status" section
  • Lacks strong conclusion
  • Will benefit greatly from an overall coherent structure
• "References" section
  • References to textbooks appear solid
  • Choice of jounal articles is questionable
  • A technical subject such as special relativity with an extensive number of possible references deserves an article that includes explicit in-line citations to its references, including page numbers. --Tim Shuba 03:38, 14 July 2006 (UTC)