Wikipedia:Requests for arbitration/Reddi/Evidence
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Reddi created an article called Solenoid effect which was near gibberish:
- Solenoid effect is the pattern shifts [or phasing] between energized and neutral states upon the electrical component. A medium once energized and produciong a magnetic field surrounding itself will will purturb the electrical component..
- Experiment: A helix solenoid is energized. This produces a magnetic field surrounding the solenoid The electric component is not purturbed by the magnetic field initially. When the field is purturbed by a negative or positive ray, an interference pattern can be detectable. The interference pattern shifts from a control state of a non-energized soleoid. .
As far as I could tell, he was garbling the Aharonov-Bohm solenoid effect, and I rewrote the article to give an accurate (and sensible) description. Fortunately, he didn't fight this edit.
(The Aharonov-Bohm solenoid effect does involve magnetic fields and shifts in an inteference pattern, so he got a few words right, but the juxtaposition is nonsensical. "Perturb the electrical component"?? "Energized and neutral states"? ...a solenoid is always electrically neutral. "A medium once energized"?? There is zero magnetic field "surrounding the solenoid", that is the whole point of the effect... A "negative or positive ray" that "purturbs" the field??)
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
This is a physicist who, in 1925, performed an experiment that seemed to detect a luminiferous ether, contradicting both special relativity and all similar experiments before (and, I think, since). Shankland (see below) some years later analyzed his data and explained how his observation could be caused by thermal problems; Shankland's analysis of Miller's experiment is now accepted by all mainstream scientists (see below). However, Reddi's early version of the Dayton Miller page wrote:
- This work on ether yielded positive results.
without saying that these positive results were never reproduced and were later discounted. He also wrote:
- Computer analysis after Miller's death on the little available data has proven that the shifts were statistically significant. Lately, there has been more of Miller's papers from the possession of R. S. Shankland to surface and they are awaiting future analysis.
This is, to say the least, extremely misleading — they were statistically significant, but it was argued (and most scientists believe) that this statistical significance was due to systematic error.
Later people revised the article to try to emphasize these facts. Still, Reddi inserted the statement that "Shankland's allegations have reportedly been later disproven." This is, in fact, not true, insofar as mainstream science is concerned (see below). Unfortunately, it's still in the article.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
- Re: Dr Dayton Miller and the Shankland paper
On the contrary, in fact, what Reddi has written in respect of this issue is quite true. The Shankland paper made some specific allegations (after Miller's death) which were subsequently withdrawn, relating to temperature effects and other experimental parameters.
Also note that it has also been successfully argued that all of the gas mode interferometer experiments (eg: michelson-morley) may be interpretted to have "detected something" rather than "nothing". The status of "NULL RESULT" is appropriate for experiments in which the expected results were not forthcoming. The MMX expected to measure fringe-shifts indicative of earth's 30 km/sec orbit revolution around the sun, but instead the results showed the equivalent of an 8 km/sec "aether drift". This could not be explained at the time, and neither could Miller explain his results, only that they were of the same order of magnitude (8k/s).
In regard to Miller, here is the transcript of an article:
GOES TO DISPROVE EINSTEIN THEORY Case Scientist Will Conduct Further Studies in Ether Drift. Einstein Discounts Experiments
Speaking before scientists at the University of Berlin, Einstein said the ether drift experiments at Cleveland showed zero results, while on Mount Wilson they showed positive results. Therefore, altitude influences results.
In addition, temperature differences have provided a source of error. "The trouble with Prof. Einstein is that he knows nothing about my results." Dr. Miller said. "He has been saying for thirty years that the interferometer experiments in Cleveland showed negative results.
We never said they gave negative results, and they did not in fact give negative results.
He ought to give me credit for knowing that temperature differences would affect the results. He wrote to me in November suggesting this. I am not so simple as to make no allowance for temperature."
--- Cleveland Plain Dealer newspaper, --- 27 Jan. 1926
DATED: 31-AUG-2005
This is the physicist who published the explanation refuting Miller's results (or rather, the conclusion that Miller demonstrated ether drift), above. This explanation is accepted by all mainstream scientists, as far as I can tell. Reddi's version, however, wrote (emphasis mine):
- In 1955, R. S. Shankland, S. W. McCuskey, F. C. Leone, and G. Kuerti perform a debated analysis of Dayton Miller's positive results. Shankland, who led the study, reports statistical fluctuations in the readings and systematic temperature disturbances (both allegations have been later disproven).
I did a literature search for all articles that cite Shankland's 1955 paper, and the handful of papers (a few, by two authors) that I could find questioning it were all in extremely obscure journals (ones not even carried by my major university library). Hardly "disproven". I rewrote the article to reflect this (and also corrected Reddi's description of Shankland as a "historian" ... as far as I can tell, he worked as a physicist all his life and was never a professional historian, although he did write a few historical memoirs based on his personal experiences.) My rewritten version included a note that there have been occasionally articles questioning Shankland's analysis, but these represent an extreme minority, and were not in prestigious journals.
Reddi, since my rewrite, has edited the article again (with scads of "minor" changes). His version once again prominently calls it a "debated analysis", which I think is disproportionate with the scale of the "debate", although he left in that it is not accepted by most mainstream scientists.
He also re-inserted:
- Shankland believed that Dayton Miller's research was a major obstacle to and overshadowed any consideration of a Nobel Prize be awarded to Albert Einstein for his relativity theory.
I can't find any reference to this in Shankland's writings, including a review paper he wrote many years later (in 1973)...and it would be quite strange, considering that Shankland thought Miller's experiment (with his explanation) was consistent with relativity. Unless it means he believed Dayton Miller's research without his own explanation would have been an obstacle; this would be a misleading way to write that.
Reddi also changed the statement that the arguments disagreeing with Shankland are not accepted "by most physicists" to "nor are they accepted widely by physicists", which is an understatement considering that the doubters are clearly a miniscule minority if they don't publish in major journals.
The current version is better than before, but it is still two steps forward, one step back.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
This was another early experiment to detect the ether; it, and several subsequent experiments in 1927 and 1994, failed to detect any ether effect, consistent with relativity. However, there was one experimenter in 1998 who claimed (in fairly obscure journals...ones not even carried by MIT's library) to have detected a positive effect. Again, it's clear that this is not believed by most physicists, and the only reference I could find in a mainstream journal was an article arguing that the 1998 experiment was not properly shielded (unliked previous experiments) and that this could have accounted for the result. Reddi's, however, described the situation as:
- Some experiment which, properly controlled, obtained positive results. Confirmation by having the experiments repeated by an third-party independent group have not proceeded.
In other words, not only did he omit that this result was only published in obscure journals and was not widely accepted, he actually adds credence to the experiment by baselessly claiming that it is "properly controlled" (implying that the others weren't, see below).
Unfortunately, this is one of those claims that is not easily refuted unless you have access to a good library, know which journals are prestigious and which are obscure, and are able to do a literature search. I was able to find time to do this, and rewrote the article to give an accurate description of the mainstream viewpoint (still including a description of the 1998 result, but accurately characterizing how it seems to be viewed), with an explanation in the Talk page. Reddi, however, re-inserted his claim (in more than one place in the article) that the 1998 experiment was "properly controlled" and implied that the other experiments "cannot be trusted" (as well as making other misleading changes, like moving the statement that the original and later experiments obtained a null result, consistent with relativity, out of the introduction to later in the article).
This unfortunately, degenerated into an edit war, later resolved with a quickpoll...I reverted his changes with an explanation in Talk, he reverted mine, and so forth. Mea culpa (at the time, I didn't know about the 3-revert rule and was getting extremely frustrated with him).
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
Reddi has edited this numerous times to add misleading material which later had to be removed. He wrote things like:
- It's conservative history draws classical field proponets.
(No one any more considers the aether "conservative", nor does it really have anything to do with "classical field theory" as the term is now usually understood.) He inserted claims that relativity was "part of the basis of quantum mechanics" (which is not historically true). Then there was his insertion (multiple times) of wholesale sections of the 1911 Britannica (way out of date in this topic) often without even labelling it as such in the text. Then there was his bald statement that the 1998 positive result in the Trouton-Noble experiment that virtually no physicists accept (see above) was "properly controlled". See also the Talk for other problems.
Later, he repeatedly re-inserted a "timeline" of ether experiments that, according to the consensus in the Talk, was extremely slanted towards aether proponents while neglecting the vast number of experiments that have confirmed relativity over and over (not to mention misleading statements such as that Shankland's analysis had been "disproven", see above). An edit war ensued, in which he repeatedly reverted to his version after multiple people deleted it (and continued to delete it). This was finally resolved by a quickpoll (in which I too, received a 24-hour ban for violating the 3-revert rule, which I had previously been aware of but mea culpa...see also above, which occurred at the same time).
Since then, however, four months later (when I guess he figured no one was looking any more), he silently (without explanation in comments or Talk) re-inserted exactly the same the material that the consensus had removed before, this time as a link to a new page: Timeline of Luminiferous Aether.
As usual, if you look at the edit history you can see that people had to fight tooth and nail with Reddi to keep the article accurate, and he deceptively marks almost all his edits as "minor". And then a few months later he starts all over again.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
Rotating magnetic field[edit]
Reddi created a page on Rotating magnetic field in which he wrote decidedly odd things like, "Nikola Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field model" and "The Rotating magnetic fields are a consequence of the fundamental principles of electromagnetic fields in physics."
First, there's nothing very fundamental about rotating magnetic fields, any more than there is something fundamental about a rotating basketball, so this is a very odd statement. Nor, in the same way, are they a "consequence" of the fundamental principles per se...they are described by the principles of electromagnetism, of course, but they are a consequence of electromagnetism combined with particular structures and stimuli (i.e., boundary conditions). (It was eventually decided that it doesn't deserve a separate page, and redirected to magnetic field.)
Second, anyone should be surprised to learn that Tesla "discovered" that magnetic fields can rotate 10 years after Maxwell published his equations, and many years after the first description of magnetic fields appeared in the scientific literature (don't you think anyone rotated a bar magnet before and saw the metal filings rotate with it?). But this is exactly the sort of thing that takes a lot of effort to refute with an explicit citation. In my case, however, I happen to have a copy of Maxwell's 1864 manuscript and he clearly describes how, for example, a smaller magnet will rotate (along with its field) to align with the field of a larger magnet, and he describes it in the tone of something already well-known (as it surely was).
(Perhaps Tesla was the first to realize how to use a rotating magnet and a current loop to produce an alternating current, and Reddi merely garbled the concept. Or perhaps it is referring to some strange alternative theory of physics by Tesla, which was never accepted...but in that case it should have been clearly labelled as such.)
It gets worse. Later in the history, he tried to connect/join the article with how the Earth's magnetic field is generated because, as he explains in Talk, "the Earth's magnetic field does rotate at the speed of light or @ the maximum speed of the medium they are in" and "The magnetic field alternate and rotate. It goes from south to north. THIS movement is the rotation of the field." Anyone who understands electromagnetism can see that this is a nonsensical description of an essentially static dipole field such as the Earth's. When Tim Starling suggested a page where he could learn some basic electromagnetism and the equation of the magnetic field of a current loop, Reddi responded, "Mmmm ... no. Please don't be asinine. I know basic electromagnetism."
See the history of that page for the long list of edit struggles with Reddi, including his practice of marking nearly everything as "minor".
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
As you may or may not know, in the late 19th century there was some notational controversy in Maxwell's equations, between proponents of a quaternion-based notation and a vector-based notation. The two formulations are mathematically equivalent (e.g. products of quaternions with no real parts give cross products etcetera). This equivalence is trivial, provable, and not seriously debatable. (Maxwell also made a particular gauge choice, but people often do the same thing in vector notation today; that's not the issue here). However, Reddi got it into his head that the quaternions included some physical content that was "lost", and edited the Maxwell's equation page to say (emphasis indicates his changes):
- In 1884, Oliver Heaviside and Willard Gibbs reformulated Maxwell's equations using vector calculus. Thus, they took out the scalar componets of the orginal quaternions Maxwell used (which niether Gibbs nor Heaviside understood). This change reinforced the perception of physical symmetries between the various fields with a more symmetric mathematical representation and less experimental evidence.
This was wrong on so many levels: Maxwell's original formulation was neither quaternion nor vector, but simply in terms of a bucketload of equations; saying that neither Gibbs nor Heaviside "understood" the quaternion formulation is a baseless slander (and hard to believe...the quaternion formulation just isn't that hard to comprehend and it was explained clearly in terms of the original equations); the change to vector notation was purely notational, didn't change the mathematical meaning at all, and thus certainly had just as much "experimental evidence". (I also checked that Maxwell himself, in a later textbook, presented the quaterion notation as promising but didn't even use it himself, finding it inconvenient.)
I explained this in the Talk (search for the text beginning "Electromagnetic History"), but as usual Reddi re-inserted the material over and over before giving up. (In the Talk he presented quotes that Gibbs and Heaviside found quaternions "inconvient" and "did not advance the theory", and Reddi seemed to think that this was evidence of their not understanding them.) In the talk he also wrote, do doubt that though they are equilivant (but i am not a math guy so until such time i can find any substantial proof ... i'll take your word for it) to modern notation ... though i thoughT, IIRC, that the modern notation cannot handle the _non-linear_ electromagnetic phenonomen that quaternions are naturally suited for (such as scalar waves). First of all, here he is admitting that he is "not a math guy" and can't prove or disprove the equivalence...what in the world is he doing editing these topics he doesn't understand? Second, he thinks the standard Maxwell's equations cannot handle nonlinearities, which is completely false. Third, scalar waves in electromagnetism are an approximation to Maxwell's equations that are accurate in certain systems, not a "phenonomen" that Maxwell's equations cannot describe!
From what he says, Reddi has been influenced by speculative articles (not published in peer-reviewed journals, as far as I can tell, and thus very far on the fringe of science) such as this one and this one. As far as I can tell, even these articles do not claim that Maxwell/Hamiton's quaternion formulation had additional physical content; rather, they argue that quaternion formulations are more easily generalized to include new physical theories, which is a completely different thing. (e.g. both papers linked include a non-zero scalar component to the electric field quaternion to represent new physics, whereas Maxwell set the scalar part to zero to maintain equivalence to his previous formulation.)
Nevertheless, long after the controversy on the Maxwell's equations page died down, Reddi added similar incorrect information to the James Clerk Maxwell page (emphasis indicates his change):
- The great work of Maxwell's life was devoted to electricity. Maxwell's most important contribution was the extension and mathematical formulation of earlier work on electricity and magnetism by Michael Faraday, André-Marie Ampère, and others into a linked set of twenty differential equations in quaternions.
First of all, Maxwell's original formulation (I have the paper) was not in quaternions at all. Second, when he finally did try quaternions, they were no longer 20 equations, because the quaternions combine equations similarly to today's vector notation. So, this was misleading/incorrect, and had already been explained to him in the Maxwell's equations pages.
Worse, the same error was then copied by someone else to the Quaternion page. They were also apparently misled by one of the fringe science articles above (which Reddi linked to from the James Clerk Maxwell page, again without any warning to the reader that the link was to an essay not peer-reviewed and very far from the mainstream) into writing "A few people claim that Maxwell's original (quaternion) equations describe certain physical effects that cannot be explained by the simplified vector equations." As I explained, this is false...even the speculative essayists are not using Maxwell's original quaternion equations. (It's not hard to be misled...the speculative article is titled "Maxwell's equations: A Brief Note", so if you know Maxwell used quaternions it's easy to jump to the conclusion that they are the same formulation...especially if, like Reddi did, you link without explanation on a page where people might reasonably expect only authoritative references.)
In otherwords, not only does Reddi insistently and repeatedly insert misleading/false information himself, but if he isn't caught quickly the same errors propagate to other pages — precisely because this is the sort of falsehood that requires significant effort and resources (i.e. a university library) to refute.
(The Quaternion and James Clerk Maxwell pages are still wrong, by the way)
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
This is an article created by Reddi about an alternative to "big bang" cosmology that is not accepted by most physicists. The article still has disputed accuracy, but if you look at Reddi's last version before anyone else substantially edited it you can see even more serious POV problems. Nowhere does Reddi's version state that the theory is not widely accepted, and he tries to add credibility to it by citing famous figures like Max Born who were only associated in a very loose sense with it, and by citing research in plasma physics which has nothing to do with alternative cosmologies.
(There a handful of articles published in refereed journals that refer to "plasma cosmology", albeit mostly more obscure journals, but none that I could find after 1997 in a literature search. See the Talk.)
He made false or misleading statements in the article such as, "Recent advances in plasma physics have shown that the cosmic environment described by the conventional developed models of the universe and the models of the visually detected universe have conflicts." (Compare with the latest version of the article.)
He makes nonsensical statements that seem to imply that all physics can be derived from a rotating magnetic field (see also above): "The dynamic coupled rotating magnetic fields produce the universe observed today" ... "The rotating magnetic field can model quarks, the geomagnetic field, and the universe's rotation." (Which aren't even true within the "plasma cosmology" as far as I can tell.) Notice that he states them as facts, not as descriptions of a particular (fringe) theory (or garbled version thereof, in this case).
As usual, the history shows a long war of combatting edits and reversions, and nearly all of Reddi's edits are marked as "minor".
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
This is something that Reddi apparently confused with "lead-lag compensators", and then wrote a nonsensical article based, apparently, on a garbled summary of this page. See Reddi's original version.
Reddi writes: "Dynamic position coupling between two or more bodies [or quanta] is the lead-lag effect, which is based on the ordinary differential equation", which is not true. The referenced page above makes an analogy between some phenomena observed with a very simple differential equation (the transfer function of a lead-lag compensator) and the two-body gravitational problem etc. Reddi's article, however, describes this simple equation (which he miscopies) as "the two-body equation", which is also not true in the usual understanding of that term (e.g. for the two-body gravitational problem).
There are various other gibberish statements in Reddi's article, such as "One frequency may lead ahead or lag behind another frequency" (leading or lagging refers to the time-delay behavior of this equation at a fixed frequency, where the leading/lagging is between the input/output of the transfer function).
Tim Starling posted a comment on the Talk page complaining that it made no sense, I concurred, and I did a literature search to see where the term "lead-lag effect" was actually used (if at all). I found some uses, mainly in economics, and rewrote the article to describe this usage, with a reference. If you look at the history for the page, you'll find that Reddi continually re-inserts his material, without bothering even to justify himself in Talk, again marking his changes as minor.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
Reddi edited an early version of the article to say:
- Quantum superposition is theoretical. It is currently believed that no observation are possible by an observer — as stated by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle — because the observer affects the state the object is observed in. this is because the non-local properties of superposition of two-particle states can not be factored into two single-particle states in any representation.
This is completely mangling the concepts, confusing superposition (which can be observed via interference patterns) with quantum entanglement. Fortunately, Reddi didn't fight it when the article was fixed.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)
Reddi wrote a garbled definition of Potential:
- In Electric circuits, it is the ability of the electromagnetic's magnetic force's ability to push one Ampere of energy through one ohm of resistance. The magentic force oscillates the current in circuits. This is also know as Potential differences.
Actually, as any undergraduate physics student could tell you, the magnetic field per se does no work (because magnetic force is always perpendicular to the velocity by the Lorentz law), and the electric potential is defined in terms of electric fields. Nor does the magnetic field "oscillate the current" in a circuit...all the work is done by electric fields, even if they are induced by changing magnetic fields. (He explained himself in the Talk by writing: BTW, the magnetic field "pushes" the elctric field through the conductor ... Sincerely, JDR (knows this is a direct result of the axiom about substituting mathematics for experiments).)
I corrected the article, and added an explanation to the Talk. However, Reddi kept re-inserting the same erroneous definition over and over again, calling it the "engineering definition" (not comprehending that the engineering usage is essentially the same as the physics usage). He even expanded the confusion, adding:
- In mechanical work, machines transmits (or modifies) energy to perform or assist in the performance of human tasks. It's potential energy exists because of the relative positions of two or more objects. [1] This potential is measured in foot-pounds (ft-lb).
Again, there is no separate "engineering" meaning of mechanical work or potential energy, which has its own page anyway. This paragraph also seems little confused: Besides the weirdness of giving the Imperial units only (which he copied blindly from the referenced page), there is the strangeness of implying that mechanical work can only be done by machines helping in human tasks, or the fact that this paragraph doesn't really even define "potential".
Finally, he seems to have given up on pushing through his version, but it took almost nine months of effort at maintaining the page.
—Steven G. Johnson 22:26, Aug 26, 2004 (UTC)