Talk:Fuzzball (string theory)

Evidence of intent of vandalism

@Phantom Hoover: What you’ve done on this article is a demonstrably clear combination of Wikipedia:Vandalism (On Wikipedia, vandalism has a very specific meaning: editing (or other behavior) deliberately intended to obstruct or defeat the project's purpose, which is to create a free encyclopedia, in a variety of languages, presenting the sum of all human knowledge) and Wikipedia:Disruptive editing.

The record of everything you’ve done here cannot be erased and is there for all to see. The intent of your actions is clear and unambiguous.

Several days ago, after the looked at your contributions history. Seeing your proclivity at deleting large swaths from articles (accompanied by edit comments like “Because it's part of the proof, you dolt.”), I tried to avoid your promised disruption, I rolled the article back to this version dating to 13:59, 5 August 2023 except I deleted a {More citations needed|date=July 2013} from it. That version of the article had errors and didn’t have a single citation.

I left that version up for a couple of days in hopes that you would settle down and lose interest in vandalism and violations of Wikipedia:Do not disrupt Wikipedia to illustrate a point.

Here’s what you did: all you did just now was to roll it back to the August version (the one with zero citations, except you made THESE minor changes to the lead to falsely make it appear that you had made edits in earnest to add value.

I hadn’t intended to set a trap for you; I merely wanted to avoid needless wikidrama and allow you time to cool down.

I’ll be taking you to Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents if you engage in any more of this.

Greg L (talk) 15:43, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I am again asking you to raise this as an incident rather than threatening to do so. Phantom Hoover (talk) 15:45, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

This is a clear-cut case that doesn't need to go to ANI. Phantom Hoover's actions speak louder than words. As @Greg L: alleged, this is a clear-cut case of disruptive editing that purposely made the article much much worse just to prove SOME sort of point. Or maybe the objective was just to annoy another editor. The above thread (Pronunciation of Chandrasekhar) where the two got crosswise over the inclusion of a pronunciation provides a good clue as to the underlying motives of Phantom Hoover and why he/she would harm the project like that. In the name of "improving an article" one doesn't roll it back from a modern version with 31 citations to a shadow of the article that has zero citations with the stated intention to one day make is suck less.

I'm restoring the original version, which is clearly superior. Phantom Hoover would be well advised to edit constructively throughout Wikipedia from hereon. MLee1957 (talk) 20:18, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

@MLee1957: Thank you very much. Greg L (talk) 20:53, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I see I'm going to have to raise the incident myself, then. Phantom Hoover (talk) 21:01, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

Despite your protestation in your edit summary professing “Good faith contributions,” they are obviously nothing of the sort. No one rightfully does what you did to this article (taking it from a well-reading article with 31 carefully researched citations and turn it into a stub from earlier this year that had no citations—and a “no citations” tag to boot). Wikipedia doesn’t need people stirring up drama for the shear joy of it.

As for the other editor (MLee1957) not being to your liking, would you be pleased with anyone on Wikipedia who actually disagreed with you? He/she is the one who responded to my request for advise on Talk:Neutron star. MLee1957 chose to respond and I did not solicit help from him/her directly. Greg L (talk) 21:54, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

I'll be honest, Greg L. (birthdate uncertain but had a son joining the military in 2006), I have an unproveable hunch that M. Lee (born 1957?) may be a relative of yours. But I suppose it could be a completely uninterested person who happened to create an account half an hour after you got into an argument, for the sole purpose of taking your side in said argument. Stranger things have happened. Phantom Hoover (talk) 22:17, 3 December 2023 (UTC)

@Phantom Hoover: You are persistently editing against consensus here. MLee1957 and I both see your continued removal of large swaths of material as disruptive editing to make a point. You must discuss such radical measures here on this talk page. Greg L (talk) 05:20, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I am frankly gobsmacked that you would engage in such provocative actions while there is an ongoing ANI. Greg L (talk) 05:22, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I'm not reverting to the early-August version of the page, I'm cutting out unnecessary content from your long-form version while keeping relevant citations and references. I don't know how any reasonable person could look at the notes section of your article, which contains around half of the total text and includes multiple embedded images and animations, and agree that this is a good way to structure an article on fuzzballs. I similarly don't know how you expect anyone to buy your line that you and MLee1957 form an overriding 'consensus', when they are clearly a friend you tag-teamed in when this dispute heated up on the 1st of December. Phantom Hoover (talk) 09:01, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I agree with Phantom Hoover. Please don't add your worse revision back Greg. Ultraneutral (talk) 09:49, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I don't have much of an opinion on which is worse, only that per WP:ONUS it's up to Greg L to build consensus for his version, if that's what he wants. Woodroar (talk) 14:46, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

The edits by @Phantom Hoover are obnoxious. The response by @Greg L in calling these edits vandalism was inappropriate but natural given the way @Phantom Hoover was approaching the article. The back-and-forth by both parties has not made this article better.

@Greg L gave a lengthy (way too long IMO) discussion on the scope of this article. That established consensus for his point of view (1>0). @Phantom Hoover made no comment.

In view of the massive deletes, @Phantom Hoover should have discussed the reasons on the Talk page. The August version does seem too long for such a minor topic, but a little human decency would avoid all this drama. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:00, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Leaving the squabbling over who did what aside, Greg L's post about the scope of this article contains a lot of irrelevant rambling (a common theme...), but I actually agree with part of it as a proposed goal: "For the most part, this article (Fuzzballs) is focused on the distinctive properties of fuzzballs and how they differ from classic black holes and neutron stars.". This is basically what I also think the article should be. It's not the article Greg L wrote. The two largest deletions I made are of very long sections giving detailed descriptions of neutron star collapse and the mechanism of Hawking radiation. These sections say nothing about fuzzballs, are not used to support any other statements about fuzzballs, and include their own digressions so irrelevant as to approach the point of parody. There's a 300 word diversion about colour theory in there, with a link to the dress. Surely you agree that the article is better off without this material, at least? Phantom Hoover (talk) 16:29, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

No, don't leave the squabbling aside, that is my point. You created this situation, not Greg L. He puffed up the article with fluff. All you had to do was create a topic and say, "Hey the section on neutron star collapse seems too long, it should be a WP:summary; I checked and all of the material is already in neutron star. I'll cut the section back to a summary.". At most that results in a focused discussion on the content and what should be included.

I urge you to focus on the goal of a good encyclopedia, not winning a content war. Greg L has done some good work and just got carried away. Help bring balance and improvement through cooperation rather than slash and burn. Johnjbarton (talk) 16:56, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I am trying to focus on improvements to the article here. You keep blaming me for escalating this to a dispute, but I made a polite, friendly contribution to the Chandrasekhar pronunciation guide and immediately got a hostile, dismissive response from Greg L, and then when I said I had more issues with the page content and would be reviewing it for relevance he deleted the talkpage discussion and then rolled the entire article back 4 months in what he has subsequently admitted was an attempted smokescreen to make me lose interest. He was clearly not interested in discussing the scope of the article.

I would really like to move past the squabbling and finger-pointing and start actually forming a consensus on what kind of material falls inside the scope of the article. Could you let me know if you think the two sections I linked in my previous post are worthy of inclusion or deletion, for instance? Phantom Hoover (talk) 17:42, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Those look like good removals to me. I agree that focusing on the distinctive properties of fuzzballs and how they differ from classic black holes and neutron stars is a sensible goal for the article. Bringing in wave-particle duality, charcoal briquettes, complaints about science YouTube, etc., doesn't actually work towards that goal. Some of the removed material could potentially be suitable for other articles, while some of it isn't encyclopedic. (E.g., online popular culture sites such as physics discussion boards, science websites, and even a university physics professor on YouTube writing calculations on a blackboard were promulgating a misunderstanding belongs on a personal blog, not here.) XOR'easter (talk) 18:36, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Reference 4, the Why String Theory book by Conlon, doesn't appear to mention fuzzballs. Its use here amounts to WP:SYNTH. The animation of vibrating strings amounts to decoration, and the lengthy discussion in the adjacent paragraphs about experimentally hunting for superpartners is off-topic here. XOR'easter (talk) 20:29, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

We should break the content discussion out into a new section, there's quite a lot of work to be done and I've found a couple of good sources that should definitely be used. Phantom Hoover (talk) 20:50, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

One person setting out what they think an article should be about doesn't establish a consensus. 1 is greater than 0, but a consensus requires at least two people to agree. Most of the "Scope of this article" section above isn't even about the scope of this article; the "Details" are nearly all about a different article, and nearly all of the rest is general concerns about citation practices that probably shouldn't even be raised on the Talk page of a specific, semi-obscure article (instead of WikiProject Physics, the Village Pump, etc.). XOR'easter (talk) 18:14, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

I broadly agree with your comments about the extraneous content in the article and the scope topic. But no one responded to the scope topic. No one commented on the fluff. One person setting out to delete a lot of recent addition does not establish a consensus, but it does create a lot of extraneous drama, quite a lot more than needed for a semi-obscure article. Humans are editing these articles, at least until we drive them all away. Johnjbarton (talk) 01:25, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Content and sources

I'm just going to dump some papers I've found that may be accessible enough to extract some useful details from:

• Fuzzballs and Observations, 2020, overview of observational predictions of fuzzballs for non-specialised theoretical physicists. Might help with the section on potential tests and observations.
• Fuzzballs and Microstate Geometries: Black-Hole Structure in String Theory, 2022, recent academic overview of the status of the theory overall.
• Observational Opportunities for the Fuzzball Program, 2023, has a very striking side-by-side render of a black hole compared to a fuzzball, showing very different images; but may be describing a fine-tuned example model rather than a generic property of fuzzball solutions.

I'm particularly curious about what fuzzballs are actually predicted to look like, mostly because I'd always assumed they looked exactly like black holes emitting Hawking radiation until you start probing the microstructure near the horizon. I suppose any viable model more or less has to, otherwise it would be inconsistent with the event horizon telescope images. But I don't remember seeing any sources that clearly say that, so I'm wondering if it's something I made up in my head. From what I've seen of the state of the theory it's possible that questions like what happens to a ray of light hitting a fuzzball simply have no settled answer at this stage, and the article would have to reflect that if so. Phantom Hoover (talk) 23:35, 4 December 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. The current sourcing seems to rely heavily upon science news stories, university websites/press releases, and such. Moving in the direction of recent journal articles would be a good idea. XOR'easter (talk) 19:55, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

While I do look warily on pop science publications they're the closest thing we have to reputable secondary sources on this topic, so I think we still need to keep them to hand as a counterbalance to the hazards of trying to directly interpret primary research. I've been driving myself halfway to distraction trying to build a picture from the papers I've seen, my impression being that they focus very intensely on the handful of things they can actually prove and are frankly handwavey and heuristic when it comes to the broader picture of what goes on beyond 'easy' models of particular string microstates around the horizon. There are some fascinating details in there that seem like they really ought to go into the article but properly synthesising them based on the information available and my level of expertise is not easy. Some examples:

• Mathur's explanation of how a fuzzball can form from a large shell of collapsing matter is that it will quantum tunnel into a fuzzball state much sooner than the Hawking evaporation time. That's fine when it comes to resolving the black hole information paradox, but to me it seems to say that you get a classical collapse and horizon and then on some super-astronomical timescale it fuzzes out through tunnelling. But that last part is pure OR.
• There's a suggestion in some places, like this PBS Spacetime video that doesn't give any elaboration or sources, that fuzzballs actually have no interior and space around them looks like $\mathbb {R} ^{3}\setminus D^{3}$. Deep in a couple of papers I've seen some elaboration of this, in terms of caps on $S^{1}$ factors in the extra string dimensions, and again it seems really fascinating and important to the qualitative picture but fuck if I feel qualified to pull that out of the papers and present it to the public. It might not even be a generic feature of the theory!

I dunno, it turns out that advanced theoretical physics and writing encyclopaedias is hard. Who knew. Phantom Hoover (talk) 22:18, 6 December 2023 (UTC)

In my grumpier moods, I would suggest that if the only secondary sources are pop science, then we shouldn't have an encyclopedia article. We shouldn't be in the business of sweeping up whatever falls down to the bottom of the popularization cliff and passing that off as information. But that's almost certainly too pessimistic a take in this case. XOR'easter (talk) 17:27, 7 December 2023 (UTC)

See also section

Maybe add back a very few that are not already linked, that will be eventually worked into the article per seealso, thank you, Malerooster (talk) 14:54, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

Picture of Black Hole Misleading

The "Picture of a Black Hole" over the Hawaiian island is extremly misleading to non-scientific readers, as it makes one think that a Black Hole is a normal sphere sitting in a flat space with a euclidean shape, volume etc. That is clearly not the case, if you know anything about general relativity, and leads to misconceptions amongst laypeople. 159.205.161.203 (talk) 09:02, 3 April 2024 (UTC)

It’s another leftover from the old version of the article, which was deeply flawed and needed a ground-up rewrite that I found difficult to approach given the lack of sources that could be easily summarised into an encyclopaedic article (which I have no experience writing). I keep telling myself I’ll get back to it one day. Phantom Hoover (talk) 23:11, 7 April 2024 (UTC)