## Thursday, December 19, 2013

### Langevin, Michelson, Millikan: anniversaries

Paul Langevin was born in 1872 in Paris and died on December 19th, 1946, in the same city. Because he was a rather important representative of the French science and a science official, great physicists have encountered him at many conferences. Langevin was also a leading figure who promoted relativity in France.

The modern interpretation of diamagnetism and paramagnetism in terms of electron clouds asymmetrically or anisotropically located within atoms is due to Langevin. As a college freshman, we were taught the explanations of these "canonical effects" like Langevin's diamagnetism by Prof Sedlák. Before that, I didn't believe that that "non-fundamental physics" may be this insightful. ;-) But at that time, I began to like these crisp explanations in condensed matter physics and many other non-fundamental physical subdisciplines.

In statistical physics, he wrote down the Langevin equation describing Langevin dynamics. The simplest example is Brownian motion in a potential: Langevin's equation is then Newton's equation of motion with the classical potential term, a friction term, and a noise term. He also designed some ultrasound-based technology based on the piezoelectric effect (previously demonstrated by the Curie brothers) to locate submarines during the war but when the gadget was ready, the war was over.

It is a matter of rumors whether Langevin was ever dating (I mean having coitus with) Marie Curie. However, there is no doubt that his granddaughter and her grandson (two generations later, switched sexes) are married to each other today. ;-) Langevin was an outspoken opponent of Nazism and was removed from his chair by the Vichy government and returned there in 1944.

Albert Abraham Michelson was born on December 19th, 1852, to a non-religious Jewish family in Prussia. His father was a merchant. They moved to the U.S. when he was 3 years old. He spent his childhood in California and Nevada and his teen age in San Francisco where he lived along with his aunt who was the mother of author Harriet Lane Levy.

President Grant sent the young Michelson to the U.S. Naval Academy to honor him. When Albert was 17 or so, he would study drawing, climatology, optics, and heat. At age of 25, when he was already in the circle of various Academic occupations I won't enumerate, he would marry Margaret Hemingway, the daughter of a rich New York stockbroker and lawyer. He would have 3 kids with this woman and 3 kids with his second wife.

Photons are massless, moving along null trajectories. Acapellascience explains – and exposes some of the software that was used for Bohemian Gravity, too.

As a scientist, he was fascinated by the measurements of the speed of light. He would improve some interferometers and measured $$c$$ up to four significant figures in the 1870s. Along with Edward Morley, they would present their famous MM experiment in 1887: the speed of light was independent of the seasons, apparently contradicting the prediction of the aether wind. Note that Einstein wrote his special relativity papers 18 years later and he wouldn't even directly refer to the MM experiment, energizing the belief that he didn't need any experiments. The only reason to think that Einstein might have been aware of the negative result of the MM experiment was Einstein's reference to a paper by Lorentz that did mention the MM experiment.

He would be the first American who received the Nobel prize in sciences – in 1907. He died in Pasadena in 1931, aged 78. This biography of Michelson may look like he wasn't a terribly interesting chap and the measurement of the speed of light was really the only thing he did. The reason behind this impression is that based on the sources, I do believe that this is a good approximation to describe his passions and discoveries in science. Sorry.

Robert Andrews Millikan grew up in Iowa. He went to Columbia University. Today, we usually think about left-wing extremists and an aggressive, unconstructive crackpot when the name of that university is mentioned (apologies to a few exceptions, especially to Bill and Brian). But there used to be different people at Columbia in the 1890s.

Millikan always wanted to be ahead of his class – in physics, Greek, and other subjects – and it had a somewhat good reason.

By being so fast, he became the first physics PhD at Columbia University in 1895. His advisors had pretty interesting names, too. One of them was Michael Pupin, of the Pupin Hall fame (a Serbian-born guy doing electromagnetism), and the other was aforementioned Albert Michelson, famous for the Michelson-Morley experiments. Yes, these two shared a date, December 19th, but they didn't know because for Millikan, it was the date of death.

Needless to say, Millikan is well-known for the measurement of the elementary electric charge. He also verified Einstein's predictions for the photoelectric effect. Millikan was awarded the physics Nobel prize in 1923 for these two things. Between 1921 and 1945, he was the president of Caltech.

I guess that you know Millikan's experiment: we had to reproduce it in the college which was pretty interesting. The electrostatic force acting in one direction (down) and the resistance of the air in the other direction (up) determine the stationary speed of oil drops which are observed under the microscope. By looking at these things and making some calculations, the electron's charge can be reconstructed and the very quantized character of the charge may be confirmed.

In "Cargo Cult Sciences", Feynman offers his insightful story about the people trying to cheat and to preserve the previous wrong values of the electric charge, in order not to deviate from others too much. So the initial wrong value was gradually increasing, before reaching $$1.602 \times 10^{-19}$$ Coulombs. In the ideal world, they should have gotten the right value instantly. I was not able to find any detailed numbers about this story. The only thing I know is that in Stockholm 1923, Millikan already had the value $$1.59 \times 10^{-19}$$ Coulombs which is pretty good although the error (1%) was 5 times higher than his standard error.

It is an unknown story that Millikan measured the charge together with his student, Harvey Fletcher, who would later study acoustics and physics of medicine. They agreed on a contract that Millikan would be exclusively credited for the oil-drop experiment while Fletcher would become the only author of another experiment that allowed Fletcher to complete his PhD.

Experimenters are reactionary theorists

But I want to mention a negative side of Millikan's physics, namely his opinions about the theory. Although Millikan tried to be ahead of others in his class, he was very slow in comparison with the world's leading theorists.

For example, his more accurate measurements of the photoelectric effect were motivated by Millikan's desire to prove that Einstein was wrong and light couldn't have had any corpuscular i.e. particulate properties. It was known that light behaved as waves, which are not particles, and Millikan felt certain that it couldn't have been both. By succeeding in his accurate verification of all Einstein's predictions, Millikan failed to prove his main point.

Once he accurately confirmed Einstein's theory, he still wrote that "Einstein's photoelectric equation... cannot in my judgment be looked upon at present as resting upon any sort of a satisfactory theoretical foundation" although he didn't hide that all the predictions were verified accurately. Sorry but this was an unscientific approach. He was really a denier, much like the deniers of the natural climate change.

The success of theories depends on their predictions and if one owns a unique theory that can accurately reproduce the experiments, it's damn likely that there is a very important aspect of the truth incorporated in this theory, to put it very mildly.

Well, he was just too reactionary in his physics opinions. In his case, one can attribute it to his general attitudes to life. Following his father, he was a Christian – in a congregational church – and liked to praise California for owning some of the most Western and most Anglo-Saxon towns in the world. ;-)

Although his work after the 1920s resembled one of a 19th century engineer, he was still giving new modern contributions to the body of knowledge called physics. At Caltech, he studied cosmic rays. Equally importantly, he invented the term "cosmic rays". ;-)

Millikan died of heart attack in San Marino, CA at age 85 i.e. on December 19th, 1953.

Bonus: People familiar with Cambridge, Massachusetts, can immediately recognize the Memorial Drive. Some company close to MIT has developed this pretty electric wheel that turns your ordinary bike into a muscle-electric hybrid. When you press the pedals, it just helps you.

The battery looks sort of thin – but at the top speed of 25 km/h, the range is said to be 50 kilometers. The recharging time is 4 hours, may be repeated 1,000 times (perhaps 50,000 km in its lifetime), voltage is 48 volts, the weight is 5.9 kg, the motor has 250 W power (US: 350 W), it uses some energy from braking, amplifies your normal throttle to feel natural. Add a smart control, SDK, and seamless design.

The Copenhagen Wheel (see their website; nice name but it didn't arise because of quantum mechanics; it's called in this way because of the Danish capital's acting as a testtube for this product) comes along with an iPhone app LOL.

You may pre-order one of the 100 limited-edition copies to be delivered in Spring 2014 just for \$699. It does look attractive! See also automated elevator underground parking for bikes in Japan.

1. Hey Lubos, Why don't you publish papers anymore? You're matrix string paper was a hit, but on arxiv your last one was in 2006, almost 8 yrs ago!

2. Thanks for this nice interesting reading, and link to the A Capella song :-)

That one I have not yet seen, so I'll have to watch it immediately ...

3. I do think that reactionary experimenters like Millikan are indeed important, no matter what their beliefs are, as long as they are honest to show the best experimental results possible. That only assures that a theory is right, if a guy that does not believe in it is unable to disprove it.

4. Well, actually Research Gate is much worse. There's not even LaTeX there.

5. Hi Lubos, dvali has a new preprint: http://arxiv.org/abs/1312.4795 he claims that blackholes would be a graviton condensate. In fact dvali has received an erc grant of 1,5 million dollars to research into that quetion: http://www.nyu.edu/about/news-publications/news/2013/10/02/physicist-dvali-awarded-15-million-grant-to-investigate-properties-of-black-holes.html What do you think of it?

Note that t'hooft writes on that on his homepage: http://www.staff.science.uu.nl/~hooft101/ that perturbative gravity can not describe blackholes as dvali wants: "As I have been emphasizing for more than two decades now, the text book description of quantum gravity (where the Einstein-Hilbert action is quantized using standard procedures) shows flaws here that run deeper than that it generates infinities: it does not allow a description of a black hole as a single quantum object."

Perhaps for this reason, there does not appear a derivation of the schwarzschild metric in classical limit. Such a transition to the classical metric would indeed , be probmelatic, as a graviton propagator can not be described near a singularity. I also find his derivation of Hawking radiation problematic. Dvali describes his blackhole as an N particle object, Hawking radiation is however a topic of quantum field theory in curved spacetimes, where, a particle number operator can not be unabiguously defined.

So what do you think of Dvali's approach to blackholes?

6. Dear Benni, it's completely wrong but I lost my enthusiasm for debunking all this pseudoscience because the result is that the perpetrators of these silly things get millions dollars from some apparatchiks for their subpar nonsense while I don't get a penny for the superior clarification of all the questions they propose to answer but utterly fail.

A black hole is an object in quantum gravity. Classically, it looks like a strong condensate of the gravitational field. But that's just a classical illusion that completely overlooks the actual quantum structure of the black hole - including all of its entropy. Quantum mechanically, a black hole is a generic state of localized matter of given mass and charges that just looks like the classical solution in the low-energy approximation.

't Hooft's comments make no sense whatsoever, either. These people have completely lost all the answers in quantum gravity that were found in recent decades. It makes no sense to study it, they're still doing the same chaotic fog from the 1960s that Feynman would angrily describe in a letter to his wife.

Reasons why related classicalons etc. by Dvali were misguided:

http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/10/why-there-are-no-classicalons-by-dvali.html?m=1

7. Hi lubos, I unfortunately can not see your or mine comment entirely. It seems to be cut after "But thats just a classical". My own opinion on this matters is this: Black holes are extendet objects and so one must quantize them nonperturbatively. For general relativity, a non perturbative quantization exists. Express the hamiltonian in canonical momenta, replace the momenta by operators and the associated poisson brackeds by kommutators. This leads to the wheeler deWitt equation. http://prola.aps.org/abstract/PR/v162/i5/p1195_1. The problem is that this theory is inconsistent for points that are very close together, or for high momentum, as dewitt notes on p 1121. Loop quantisation of the hamiltonian leads to ambiguous results due to the freedom for the holonomies. therefore, one has to wait for a non perturbative M theory description of this. However, we may just not bother of all these problems, if we are only interested in the semiclassical limit, and make a wkb approximation. As it is non perturbative, we can denn analyze semiclassical blackholes http://arxiv.org/abs/gr-qc/9708066 . This way of quantization is equivalent to the perturbative quantization since one can derive the same feynmanrules of gravitation from the canonical version, as was shown by fadeev and popov and fradlkin and tuytin, and khriplovic in russia.

DeWitt introduced this quantization method just because the perturbative methods in his first paper were unable to get a description for blackholes or the friedmann universe.

In fact I believe that the picture of perturbative quantization with gravitons that Dvali wants to employ can not even describe semi-classical non-local solutions of general relativity, like blackhole metrics. At least i do not have seen any derivation for a non local metric with that perturbative framework.

8. Jesus Christ, there is a button "see more" at the bottom of the "incomplete" comment.

I don't want to spend time with this.

9. Hi, I have found that button now. But it seems that I can see this button only if I mark the entire text of the posting. ptherwise the button is invisible in chrome or opera.

And I think you should spend more time on this, since these people are getting millions with very problematic approaches. You often devote tome analyzing blog posts of Sabine hossenfelder. But she is just a researcher with a small group.

I think if someone gets a 1,5 million research grant for an ill defined project, this is an important topic for bloggers.

10. It's still there - it just has a similar color as the background.

11. I dont know Research Gate too closely ;-)
Physics SE will soon no longer use LaTex either, if the ruling dilettants persecuting technical questions gets even worse...
And of course they use all the other pretexts for getting rid of good questions too, such as "too broad", "list issue", "unclear what you are asking", even though people knowledgeable about the topic can reasonably answer them because for knowledgeable people the question is well defined enough, the number of possible answers is small and finite, and as they understand the question it is clear to them what the OP is asking ... :-/

http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/90196/2751

A lot of these problems with dilettantes overreaching their position could be solved by making the priviledge to review dependent on the position one has on the list of top users of the leading tag of the questions ...

That whould prevent politicians from shooting down questions about topics they have no clue about ...

At present not even the best and most high-level questions are save from being attacked by hyperactive politically ambitious dimwits ... :-/

Nice article on the three great physicists. A small oversight: In Millikan's expt. you forgot to mention gravity.

13. I agree that it is important that researchers should not get grants for ill-defined projects but I also think that Lubos is doing the right thing not spending a single second on it. In my opinion he "should" spend his time working on important physics that few are able to do instead of wasting his time on these matters.

14. That's because you have your eyes screwed tightly shut.

15. Al Gore wants more, via Twitter:

“Climate deniers can no longer spread disinformation on @Reddit’s science forum: bit.ly/18QF4Rm”

16. And yes, I think that you, lubos, should again publish something on M theory. But I also believe, that somebody should write a comment to dvali's recent papers, given that they are already accepted in scientific journals. (note that the idea of blackholes as graviton condensate has nothing to do with their earlier classicalization idea)I I believe, what happens here is that somebody is taking a quantization method from which it is known since 1967, (i.e. since the appearance of the first papers on quantum gravity by DeWitt) that this perturbative quantization method can not be used for the quantization of non-perturbative extended objects. I think what happens here is similar to someone trying to describe an atomic nucleus by perturbative qcd.

It seems that dvali's articles have been accepted. E,g.
in Phys Lett B716 (2012) 240 you can read about a Landau Ginzburg Limit of Blackholes or in Phys.Lett. B719 (2013) 419-423 you can read about Blackhole's quantum N hair....and in Fortschritte der Physik 61 (2013) 742 you can learn about Black holes Quantum N Portrait..

There was a myron evans, who once published wrong articles in found phys. He was then debunked by physicists who wrote a comment in found phys and then suddenly his project was stopped.

17. If I understood Ron Maimon right, debunking "not so good" papers seems among other things a good application of the refereeing section Ron suggested for the upcoming PhysicsOverflow:

http://qr.ae/GZ6Tz

Somebody could explain there in a question what a particular paper says, and he or others could then give in answers some kind of positive or negative reviews of the paper in the question, discuss the paper and the reviews (answers) further in the comments etc ...

And of course Lumo is not the only one who can review, debunk, etc in the answers ... ;-)

It is a bit unfortunate that great physicists such as Lumo, who can very concisely debunk nonsense, are at the same time the ones needed to make progress on important physics too, as Rasmus says. But maybe the imporent task of debunking nonsense papers, projects, etc can be shared by different people a bit ...

BTW this Christmas holiday I will see Polarkernel, our informatics experts who greatly supports the PhysicsOverflow project, in person. He made good progress in solving some obstinate LaTex problems (you really need a good expert to overcome this and other technical issues), such that the time to go online will maybe not be this year, but not too far away either :-)

Cheers

18. "Aggressive, unpleasant and stupid"? Clearly you have described yourself perfectly.

19. CentralCharge15

Have you seen John Rennies typical answer here?

http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/questions/5328/post-downvoting-am-i-doing-something-wrong/5330#5330

That is really off putting how this guy insults people who are interested in higher-level stuff and who are at least willing to keep up the level slightly above zero at least, as elitists etc. He is always so worried about people who have no clue about physics discouraged on Physics SE but gives a damn about driving away good stuff and experts by this attitutde. I first thought he is a rather nice guy, but the more he started to use his power in the review queues too, the more he upsets me. He and Brandon Enright are among the 3 worst offenders who shoot questions about topic they dont understand down and prevent that any good higher-level questions (wrongly closed) can get reopend.

Brandon Enright recently even admitted in chat that he upvotes all answers of John Rennie, indepentent from what he says. And I know that John Rennie can write good nice answers on rather popular questions, but is capable of writing horribly wrong and misleading things too.

About setting things right on Physics SE, I have similar feelings to what Lumo experiences concerning nonsense papers, I am pissed of in a similar way.
The site should probaly be renamed from "Physics Stack Exchenge" to "Stack Exchange Popular Physics", as SE rules are clearly more important than good content to the dominating politicians and people like John Rennie, highly respected and even serially upvoted by people who have no clue about physics themself, strongly support low-level popular stuff and people interested in this at the expense of real experts and people seriously interested in higher-level more technical theoretical physics.

So I really look forward to see Polarkernal in person to speed up progress with our urgently needed PhysicsOverflow ... !

20. The key word here is "belief". Consider it your religious freedom.

21. But Mr. Allen's Grist article was not peer reviewed, and yet it was not only left unmoderated, but voted to the top of the front page of /r/science.

Mr. Allen has a point that some of the anti alarmists comments are rude (the alarmist raving is ruder still, to the point of appearing rabid, but remains undeleted), but many of the comments that have been summarily removed are well reasoned, well cited and polite in the face of over the top hostility.

22. CentralCharge15 we have almost reopent the loop-amplitude question

http://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/30621

it has 4 reopen votes at present (one even from John Rennie ;-) ...), to bad that good people like Trimok, anna v, etc do not visit the review queues.

23. Hm, I think I had originally VTrOed (not in the review queues). Maybe you have forgootten to VTrO it?

24. My reopen vote is the first one, so you cant see it in the review. Not sure if I should explicitely ping anna v or another nice wise powerful enough user explicitely and ask him to provide the 5th one ...

25. I know that, but the system tells me I have already VTrOed the question, so shouldn't it already have 5 reopen votes? Or maybe I had VTrOed it before, and the reopen vote was trashed by ohters hwo votwed to close it : (

26. Yes, I suspect what happend is that it was already in the review queue once but 3 dilettants kicked it out, such that what I started is the second try to reopen... Anna v will certainly help when pinged about it, she did not take part in the first try and can therefore still vote to reopen.

27. Bazinga, now it is open ;-P ;-) :-)

I successfully pinged Trimok below the question, and of course deleted my comment afterwards ...

Cheers!

28. CentralCharge15

I wonder if we should support Manishearth in the new homework discussions started by this astonishingly nice post of John Rennie,

http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/q/5369/2751

even though I dont agree with his highlighting the SE point of view that views and votes from outside the site are much more important etc ...

But Manishearth may be rather tolerant towards technical high-level questions, and if David Z manages to push his will trough things will be much much worse ... :-(

See also the follow up posts. I think now it will be decided if it will still be possible to ask high-level advanced topic technical questions next year too on Physics SE, or if the site will completely ban them in the future ...

I hope my not being able to shut up my big mouth has not put the final nail into the coffin towards the second bad possibility :-/, darn !

29. I downvoted ManishEarth's post, since he considers a lot of the actually very good posts as "ooff-topic".

By the way, what is the point of participating on PhysSEs, especally metia, anymore, anyway? I will now hopefully be abqle to cancel out some of the "stuff that I'll continue" from my profile.

30. Right ... :-/

Later in the discussion below John Rennies posts, Manishearth explicitely said that user26143 s nice technical questions about CFT, ST, etc are borderline closable and so on...
So there is nothing left to do .... :-(

The issue of more and more advanced technical questions getting mistagged as homework, bothers me and disturbed my peace of mind since months. I had yesterday s post sitting on my laptop since quite some time. Reading John Rennies astonishingly reasonable question, I decided to put it out as my final end of the year message to be able to draw the final line.

Now all is said and done ...

31. @CentralCharge15
I dont know how reasonable this still would be, but if still want to try to reopen good questions on Physics SE, I think we should synchronize our efforts an team up a bit:

My idea is that one of us casts the initial reopen vote on a question that should not be closed, then we let 3 trolls say "leave closed" which is what they always do anyway :-/, then the other of us two puts the question back into the reopen queue, before the reopen votes it has attained so far decay, by voting to reopen too.

This approach seems to be the only way to have a real chance to succeed (Kyle Kanos belongs definitely to the dark side), if any ..

However, I am really not sure if such efforts are still worth it, and it would need us to check the reopen queue several times each day in order to timely cast a new reopen vote to put the question back into the queue...

What do you think?

I will watch out for good questions appearing in the reopen queue a bit for a while, at least until I read your opinion.

Casting a single (initial) reopen vote is pointless without teaming up and persuing any strategy, as the trolls kick it out of the queue before it reaches the 5 votes needed. So I will no longer do this...

32. Ok, good idea, already just did that to one such qqeustion.

Have you VTrOed this already? :
http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/90634/23119

But note that this such efforts may not be very successful, because:
(1) Mods will kick out the votes
(2) My time zone is very different from yours, so the reopen votes may decay
(3) I am currently using a mobile broadband device, which is sometmies so slow I can't click "reopen".

33. I thought reopen and close votes decay within days and not hours, so the time zone will not be that big a proble...
But of course negative mod interference (they never do something helpful like contributing the 5th reopen vote), such as kicking the question out of the queue a secondtime or even locking, are detrimental

Unfortunately my reopen vote on the causual sketches question was the initiale one, such that I can not vote a second time...

But if you keep watching a bit what happens too, I can cast other inital reopen votes from time to time again,you can do the same, and with our strategy plus some luck and no negative mod interference it could work better than up to now...

34. ... negative mod interference with the reopen queue ... :-/

http://physics.stackexchange.com/review/reopen/31122

I have put it back into the queue.

Maybe I should ask the following question on the Physics SE main page:

*************************************
Title: Why is the interference of moderators with the reopen queue always negative?

From experiments, the empirical fact seems to become statistically significant at a 5 sigma level, that the interference of moderators with the reopen queue is strictly negative if any:

The not interfering moderators avoid the reopen queue, whereas the destructive ones kick good questions, that have attracted reopen votes out of the queue by their binding "leave closed" in the weakling interacting regime, or in strong interacting non-perturbative situations they even lock questions as soon as they are at the verge of getting community reopend (have 4 or 5 reopen votes) and delete the votes.

Positive interactions of moderators with the reopen queue, such that they would for example cast the 5th reopen vote on questions the community tries to reopen, have not been observed so far.

So my question is: Is there any physics reason or mathematical constraint, that rigorously explains why the interference of moderators with the reopen queue has to be strictly negative? Is there some kind of no-go theorem that excludes helpful positive interactions of moderators with the reopen queue?

Any pointers or hints to fundamental theoretical explanations of these observations, are appreciated.

Tags: Quantum Mechanics, Experimental Physics, Mathematical Physics, Research-Level

*************************************

35. The CAGW worshipers, follow the pattern of other leftist, fascist movements by selecting the name for their ideological opponents. In this case either 'climate skeptics' or more frequently, 'climate deniers'. I saw we create our own name: 'climate realists'.

:

37. I have deleted it myself because I better stop writing Q and A s there ...
For a moment I thought it is important that an answer expressing the right attitude, that is why I initially wrote it.

But nothing can be done against the ruling anti academic SE politicians and the coward braneless sheep saying yes and amen to everithing the diletants propose and who downvote every reasonable point of view.

38. Kyle Kanos is such a big anti-scientific, anti-academic SE gullomized zombique politician, have you seen his edited answer and the horrible comments he addresses at me in the laymen books meta discussion?

I am so happy and thankful to Polarkernal for making good progress on the technical issues for our PhysicsOverflow ...!
On PhysicsOverflow, such power hungry politically driven pompous fools, dimwits, knownothings and trolls will be banned FTL ...!!!

39. I had VTrOed it earlier, but David Z has locked the question.

40. Yep, that is not surprising :-/

I also flagged these questions for reopen and putting in the banner

http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/89578/2751
http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/7336/2751

But Manishearth declined both of them, so you are right trying to help with the new books policy is completely futile ...

This question should be reopend too, as it is perfectly legitimate to ask about the exclusively stringy effects on the bulk side of the AdS/CFT business

http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/89578/2751

Manishearth invited me to discuss it on Meta, but because of my less strong health than I thought I can no longer afford to get entangled into emotionally straining, pointless, Meta discussions there like this ...

What David Z says here in principle sounds good (note the dilettants who disagree in the comments because they want to drag the level of the site to the bottom), but I dont believe him a word that he is serious about it:

http://meta.physics.stackexchange.com/a/5411/2751

I upvoted the text, but his moderator actions speak a different language...

41. CentralCharge15

Have you seen this? Now Kyle Kanos, one of the worst reviewers who regularely overreaches his knowledge and trys to shoot down (in particular technical) questions about topics he has no clue, is outright trolling and personally attacking me

http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/94233/tise-for-a-triangular-potential?noredirect=1#comment192867_94233

because I dared to contradict him and state that I am not particularly amused by people shooting down perfectly legitimate technical questions.

Of course I do not bother to reply to such trolling users any more ... ;-)

42. @CentralCharge15
have you seen what happend here?

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/649087/string-theory-1-1-1-dots-frac12

Even Lumo said "Leave Open" and that the question is more important in Physics than in Maths...
But the dominating trolling dilettantes, dimwits, know-nothings, simply give a damn about what real experts say ... :-/.

Physics SE have become much worse than Quora now: it is sometimes difficult to get answers for technical questions on Quora, but conversely to Physics SE, at least they do not actively and aggressively persecute good up to excellent high-level questions there ...

43. Yes, I saw that just yesterday.

Quora at least points out the fact it is mostly for Pop-Sci...

After all, just look at the nasty anti-Physics comments on the question that the question (now on maths) has been marked as duplicate of... SUch questions are not appropriate for migrating to Maths, their perspective is totally different, but clearly the trolls have no idea about that.

I am astonished that they don't even re-think their decision even if they know that Lubos said "leave open".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that they should say "Leave Open" just because Lubos said so, but wouldn't they at least realise that they should re-think their decision to close it once more?! And instead people like Brandon Enright just upvote all of John Rennie's answers...

44. D no votes when I saw iSeems I made things even worse by asking them to close the old mathe se question (if anything) and leave the migrated one open because it had more upvotes, better and highly upvoted answers etc ...

But Willy Wong screwed it up: he merged the migrated question into the old one such that ithaad no votes when I saw it. And the merged question is closed as unclear what you are asking.

To bad, that physics SE is dominated by dilletantes and SE disciples who are no longer able to use good judgement and reason, but blindly enforce their personal opinion and/or interpretation of the SE sect rules. And they are so arrogant, that they feel entitled to completely disrespect real physicists and experts or even dispense of them by chasing good physicists passively or even actively gressively away as we know ...

45. Now I have written an answer to the

People who support the question and disagree with it being closed, are kindly invited to upvote it ;-)

Cheers

46. Now I have impoved my profile on Physics to include so kind of breakup note...

47. Now, Physics.SE has a tag called "Physics", which only 2 questions are tagged witbh at the momment.

48. An "planck-scale"! :

49. Yes, not even on Quora they apply such painfully unprofessional bad tags on physics questions ...

On the contrary, on Quora they are quite picky about the proper use of tags, I once had some lively but happy ending discussions with an administrator there ... ;-)

BTW isnt it simpliy ridiculous how the dominating dilettantes prevent legitimate rather advanced technical questions from getting reopend, even though the majority of the physicist community disagrees with them being closed?

http://physics.stackexchange.com/q/94901/2751

If I did not make a typo, Manishearth gracefully ignores my comment (I thought moderators get always pinged and he commented in chat after my comment ...), and he blatantly breakes his once given promise to leave advanced technical question alone (or reopen them after an improvement).

I really look forward to the time when PhysicsOverflow is running and we can tell people to repost their questions there or simply import them.

The second I have already done to my offline Q2A site :-)

50. I really wonder why it is that David Z always systemattically shoots down legitimate rather advanced technical completely legitimate QFT questions unilaterally, such as the action of the parity operator question and many others, whereas all of the low-level stuff he leaves alone.

His at the same time stating in answers to certain meta questions that Physics SE should be higher level than Quora, Physics Forum, etc are nothing bot hollow meaningless words and/or outright dishonest deception, compared to his moderator actions.

Generally it is a shame that not a single one of the moderators bothers to and or has the courage to defend good rather advanced questions against the ongoing persecution by the dominating dilettantes by stating a helpful supportive leave open or reopen.

The only thing they do is to join the party of shooting down legitimate questions and kick wrongly closed questions out of the review queue, if anything.

Darn was I naive, when I thought that moderators are there to defend the needs and goals of the physicist, students, and serious enthusiasts on the site, wanted Qmechanic to be a mod because I expected him to defend theoretical physics and physicists, etc ... :-/!

51. Darn, where the f*ck is WetSavannaAnimal aka Rod Vance When we urgently need his reopen vote?

The Parity operator question has 4 reopen votes and now the anti TP zealot Chris White has just kicked it out of the queue by a third leave closed ... :-(

Could you ping Rod Vance at an insuspiceous place, and ask him? My Internet on the laptop stillsucks and from my smart phone I can not post a link to the questions?

Why is it that trolling mods and anti TP rascals likr Chris White + the dilettantes always win?