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Does Wikipedia Suck on Science Stories?
An anonymous reader writes "An editor from Wired writes on his blog that Wikipedia sucks for science stories — not because they are inaccurate, but because of what he calls the 'tragedy of the uncommon': Too many experts writing about subjects in ways that no non-expert can understand. Would this be the dumbing-down of Wikipedia — or would it be a better resource for everyone?"
This is largely the fault of physicists. Mathematicians complain about their abuse of notation constantly; whereas mathematicians go to great pains to come up with mathematical notation that is clear, concise, useful, and most importantly, general, physicists seem to love their little pet symbols. Even Richard Feynman, whom I greatly respect, talked about how he discovered some of the basic notions of calculus on his own as young student, and came up with his own notation as a result -- nothing wrong with this, mind you -- but then went on to say that he continued to use this notation in his own work and notes for much of his high school and undergraduate years. I hate to say it, but that's sort of typically physicist. Needlessly obfuscatory. Richard Feynman was a smart guy, to be sure, but his pet notation was unlikely more intuitive than the notation that mathematicians had spent centuries developing and refining, many of whom were -- no offense to the man, he's in good company -- much more intelligent than Richard Feynman was.
Quantum Physics is filled with examples like this -- some physicist, through the course of his research, reinvents the mathematical wheel because he hasn't been exposed to much technical maths, and so his pet notation becomes standard among physicists, even though mathematicians studying the problem more abstractly had come up with elegant and concise notation a hundred years prior.
It's tremendously frustrating. See for example all the wacky bra and ket bullshit in QM. Or the algebraic manipulation of infintesimals as if they were members of the real or complex fields (of course, one can do something like this with differential forms, but very few physicists seem the least bit aware of the corner cases and happily "multiply through by dx" without considering what that means). It's extremely frustrating. My upper division electricity and magnetism teacher actually used this technique once and warned us that "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't." Can you believe it?
But then, most physicists stop taking math classes their junior year of undergrad, and from then on learn all their math in physics classes. You don't learn much math in lower division... so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that they all suck at math.
For reference... ATP article from Wikipedia. As you can see there is more information there than simply "it's a battery."
Should we delete the entire page, remove all those big words and just put "it's like a double A battery?"
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.