User talk:Milton Beychok

Milton Beychok

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 Where Milt lives it is approximately: 06:49

Guidance sought on Astrophysics article and creating a 'dating' article

Dear Milton: Thank you for the email notifications. John Brews has also left a pleasant note on my User talk page. It's a little intimidating observing the tremendous achievement among contributors, such as yourself and John. As a technician and later an engineer working night shift much of his professional life I cannot claim such distinction.

The Astrophysics article has an error which seems elementary to me, though. Discussing the density of ordinary and dark matter, it states in effect that $W_{B}+W_{D}<1\,$; essentially, that both put together aren't sufficient to close the universe. And yet it says this means that "if that is all there is, the universe would eventually stop expanding and collapse". Isn't this exactly the opposite of what's intended?

Most of my professional contributions related to analysis of other people's designs of boilers, pressure vessels etc. to the usual industry standards (ASME VIII,1 and BS5500). As such they are hardly original, though for lifts and cranes I actually wrote my own space frame code on an old HP 9845B; and now I think about it, a special bit of code which did a thin-plate finite element analysis of heat exchanger endplates. This was quite primitive by modern standards (I had to create the mesh by hand, for example).

Such computational shortcuts allowed me to certify some designs as safe - or otherwise, in the case of certain French cranes built to a Norme Française, which were probably perfectly designed but which were a bit too cutting edge for me. Either they weren't conformal with the usual ASME or BS standards, or there was some special threat (like earthquake or wind loading).

So I was at one time fairly technically proficient in my field(s) but except for the 1986 Lift (elevator) code for NZ, not the author of anything like a reference work. With one exception: I did actually once get co-opted into writing a paper jointly with two other gentlemen on carbon dating (I had skills in signal processing which they lacked). One project I had in mind when joining Citizendium was to write about the calibration stochastic distortion associated with nonlinearities in radiocarbon decay.

But there's no radiocarbon dating article I can add to! There is one in Wikipedia, though it's patchy. Should I create a new one?

Also, should I include a mathematical formula with LaTeX? When it comes to LaTeX my favourite shortcut is to import LaTeX into AbiWord but that converts it to MathML. Besides I've never created an article before, let alone one with equations in it.

--Terry Richard Linter Cole 10:18, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Terry, I have no expertise whatsoever in astrophysics, so I cannot help you regarding the Astrophysics article. At the moment, I am very busy with other matters and I suggest that you contact John Brews with all of your above questions.

However, I will tell you that any mathematics should be either in LaTeX or html ... with LaTeX being preferable. Also, we have a policy against importing WP articles. So, if you want to write an article about radiocarbon dating, please create a new one.

Again, please contact John Brews with your above questions. You might also contact Daniel Mietchen who is one of our active Physics editors. Regards, Milton Beychok 15:03, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

You might to check these contributions

Milt I sent a message to a Constable to review these contributions but since you are online you might want to take a look. The contributions are from a new contributor so I am sure he needs a bit of guidance. See: [[1]] Thanks for checking this out. Mary Ash 04:30, 5 June 2011 (UTC)