This article was nominated for deletion on 2005-11-07. The result of the discussion was keep. |
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Note: following an AfD, this article was moved and completely rewritten; the following comments in this section apply to the old article, not to the present one, which is completely different. For comments on the new article, start here.---CH 01:57, 3 December 2005 (UTC)
The fact that this article is by an anonymous editor and cites a "web-book", rather than a reputable textbook, or research papers published in a reputable journal, should raise a red flag. The IP address 62.137.136.136 is registered to a company called Energis UK, which provides dialup access to customers in the UK. The website which hosts the cited web-book is apparently provided by a company called Tiscali UK Limited, which provides web hosting services for customers in the UK. While this is prima facie weak evidence, wiki-experienced users will understand immediately why I suspect that the anonymous editor is none other than the author of the web-book.
In fact, while the web-book author (?) presents his theory as a supposedly viable alternative to classical relativistic theories of gravitation studied in the scientific literature, scalar theories are not viable as fundamental theories of gravitation, although they can be useful pedagogically. See for example the standard textbook by Gravitation by Misner, Thorne, and Wheeler, and then see the interesting paper by Watt and Misner, Relativistic Scalar Gravity.
One specific thing I noticed which is somewhat comical: the author gives a solution for his field equation (in this case, it reduces to the usual wave equation in polar spherical coordinates) in the form , i.e. with suggestively chosen/named values for the undetermined constants, and then claims in the next section that the alleged fact that the mass parameter m falls out is remarkable evidence of the theory's veracity! Of course, on the basis of the description here, it was the author himself who arranged for the parameter m to appear so "miraculously". Anyone familiar with differential equations or physical theories will take the point immediately (and probably have a chuckle), but unfortunately, the general public is unlikely to be sufficiently sophisticated mathematically to spot this absurdity for what it is.
Another obvious problem is that the author calls his theory "relativistic", but the metric does not appear in his action, so presumably he does not have in mind a metric scalar theory of gravitation, and his "action" suggests he intends some kind of flat background scalar theory, but he doesn't even appear to realize that these points require qualification. Similarly for his putative force law, which appears without any discussion, much less attempted justification.
In short, on the basis of the description here, this constitutes unpublishable dreck and should not be presented in the WP as a viable physical theory.---CH (talk) 00:35, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
—Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.137.135.52 (talk • contribs) (dialup IP in London, registered to Energis UK, an ISP headquartered in Leeds) 12:31, 10 November 2005
In response to the criticisms by Hillman I have made changes to the article to make clear
Finally I object to the word drek which is 'inflamatory' and should not be used on Wikipedia.
—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 62.137.135.0 (talk • contribs) 18:26, 7 November 2005 (UTC)
I assume that I need not elaborate on the deficiencies of the previous version which led to this. Suffice it to say that I suggest that the new version be kept but renamed to scalar theories of gravitation as described above and in the AfD page. --EMS | Talk 04:53, 12 November 2005 (UTC)
This article still needs a lot of work, although it might be useful to postpone revision until more good articles on specific theories are available in WP. Some problems I noticed:
HTH ---CH 21:36, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
Hmm... just noticed that both those problems date right back to the version of 09:10, 13 November 2005 by our London anon, this time using 62.137.134.78 (again, dialup from London to the ISP Energis UK). ---CH 21:45, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
This has been added since it was from a secondary source that was published. Here is the wikipedia page on the science journal establishing that the source is valid (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acta_Physica_Polonica). GravityForce (talk) 10:23, 17 April 2015 (UTC)
I think there should be a minus sign in Newtonian gravity. At least that would make it compatible to the fourdimensional ansatz mentioned below it. --Diogenes2000 (talk) 21:47, 27 November 2018 (UTC)