Talk:Christopher Isham

Isham-Baez?

There's a bit of a peculiar phrase in the article:

"Together with John Baez, Isham is known as a proponent of the utility of category theory in theoretical physics"

As far as I am aware, Baez and Isham never had a paper together, so this comment isn't referring to a specific work. Therefore this is a very strange way to single out some individual contributions to a very broad field. For example, certainly Graeme Segals famous categorical definition of CFTs in 86 pre-dates things Baez did.

Significance

Just being a theoretical physicist doesn't make you significant or notable. I've known a few, and none of them rate a Wikipedia article. I'm not going to nominate this article for deletion any time soon -- but I think the {{explain significance]] should stay in the article until the article contains more than the guy's name, job, and place of business. ---Isaac R 21:34, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

I know it's much easier to slap "explain-significance" on an article than to do some research and expand it, but Wikipedia won't grow if you insist on doing the former. If you don't know who he is take a look! --Tony Sidaway|Talk 21:59, 4 May 2005 (UTC)

Hi, Isaac, I've just been through my own VfD experience and you are very wise to request comment before starting a VfD. I didn't write this stub, and while I appreciate the "theory" behind stubs, I too lament the fact that people create these things without making any attempt at all to say why the subject is notable, leaving suspicion that he might not be. In this case, at least someone provided citations, and in any case I happen to know (or believe) that Isham is an important player in modern work toward quantum gravity. I just completely rewrote the article on geometrodynamics, which might help you understand Isham's role. Yes, someone should definitely improve this article to explain why Isham is notable.---CH (talk) 14:31, 29 August 2005 (UTC)

If you are interested in some of the other recent contributions of Isham to theoretical physics I can suggest looking up the following. In the 90-s he published several articles which are considered a notable contribution to the Consistent Histories approach to quantum mechanics (c.f. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9308006 referenced in the Griffiths' book "Consistent Quantum Theory" Cambridge University Press 2002). More recently he has published a series of articles on application of "topos theory" to quantising space-time (c.f. http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0303060, http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0304077, http://www.arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/0306064) which might or might not prove significant in the long term. In either event, in his attempts to utilise "topos theory" in physics Isham is somewhat of a frontrunner - one way or another sometime somewhere within theoretical physics someone will have to start doing just that.

There is also the matter of his contribution to the early developement of the Loop Quantum Gravity. In his recent book Carlo Rovelli writes - "The mathematical-physics version of LQG started from the seminal work of Abhay Ashtekar, Chris Isham and Jerzy Lewandowski." (pg. 275, C. Rovelli, "Quantum Gravity", Cambridge University Press 2004) citing http://www.arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/9202053 . There are several other (earlier) articles referenced in Rovelli's book, however none of them are available from arxiv.org

I know very little about Isham's works from before 1990. I know that he has been contributing to theoretical physics since mid 60-s. For a number of years in the early part of his career he collaborated with Abdus Salam. Unfortunately I know nothing of the nature and significance of his early work, and therefore I don't consider myself in the position to evaluate the importance his contribution to physics.

I stumbled upon this article fortuitously and found the current state interesting and informative. I have read two of Isham's books, but I didn't know he worked on quantum gravity. I'm glad the stub was not deleted. 129.7.56.199 03:46, 5 March 2006 (UTC)