Talk:Reactionless propulsion

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I try to fill the subpages... Dmitrii Kouznetsov 12:47, 2 March 2010 (UTC)
P.S. I did all I could, and I cannot improve it more; so, I nominate it. Dmitrii Kouznetsov 13:47, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Some comments from a Constable

Hi, Dmitrii, glad to see you back in action! There are, however, a couple of problems with the creation and edits of this article. First, you cannot make up your own WorkGroup categories, such as "Russian space science" -- you can only use existing WorkGroups such as "Physics" or "Chemistry" and such-like.

Second, an Editor who has worked on an article cannot nominate it himself. Here are the relevant guidelines:

If the editor has worked on it herself as an author, he/she asks another editor to approve it; or, if there are several editors all doing significant work as authors on the article, then at least three of them can agree to approve it. (These rules are to prevent a single person from approving his or her own work without involving review by experts who were not authors.)

This means that you will have to find some other Editors to make the initial nomination. In the meantime I have removed the Approval template from the article.

Best wishes, Constable Hayford Peirce 16:34, 2 March 2010 (UTC)

Thank you, Hayford, for the explanation (First, I misunderstood the recommendations about the subpages). Also, I like your improvements. Dmitrii Kouznetsov 03:31, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Title and scope

Reactionless propulsion is probably the more general term for non-Newtonian methods. Is this article intended to be general about the subject (e.g., science fiction "warp drives" and more serious speculation about tachyon or gravitational technology) or simply address Russian work?

Most of the Russian references about criticism belong in a Bibliography subpage. In general, however, CZ discourages non-English references because it cannot be assumed other Citizens can read them. --Howard C. Berkowitz 18:05, 2 March 2010 (UTC) (Engineering Workgroup Editor)

Reactionless propulsion sounds good. Consider to rename the article, leaving the redirect.

About references: I copypasted them all in order to indicate that there is a lot of criticizm, but few of it appears in serious journals. One has no need to speak Russian in order to see the amount. For this reason, I cited them all together. The English sources cited are sufficient to see that all these "gravitsapas" are just milking of funds for pseudo-science, supported by suppressing of scientists and murdering of critical journalists. (Do you know who was Trofim Lysenko?)

As for the "warp drives", they may deserve a section. It seems, some distributors of funds do not make difference between science, science fiction and pseudo-science. I wrote about this, http://www.ils.uec.ac.jp/~dima/PAPERS/2010mestoe.pdf and I think about modification of the article Science (in order to exclude all the "wrap drives", the "gravitsapas" and the Reactionless propulsion automatically, since the beginning). You may see the sandbox User:Dmitrii_Kouznetsov/Science and criticize it; it is my proposal for Science. Dmitrii Kouznetsov 03:31, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Brief review and edits

I just made a number of edits to improve the English, correct spelling errors and to correct some of the references to the proper format. I got down to the end of the History section. To complete such edits down to the end of the article would take quite a bit of time. I may try to do that in the next few days ... but, meanwhile, anyone else may take a shot at it.

Dmitri, the Bibliography subpage needs to be completely redone. All you did was to simply re-list all of the references for the main article. That is not what is wanted for the Bibliography subpage. Therefore, I am going to delete all of the re-listed references.

The bibliography subpage is meant to include a list of books and journal articles relevant to the article. The books should be listed using the {{cite book}} template and the journal articles should be listed using the {{cite journal}} template. Dimitri, please take a good look at 5-10 other engineering articles with a Bibliography subpage to see what I mean.

The External Links subpage is intended primarily for links to Internet sources of relevant information. All you did for that section was to link to a Wikipedia article and quote a large part of the Wikipedia article. Very few (if any) of us at Citizendium would accept a Wikipedia article as an External Link. You also used the same link to a Wikipedia article and the same quote from the Wikipedia article as your reference 9 for the Main article. There is no purpose served by repeating main article references as external links ... therefore, I am going to remove that link from the Related Links subpage. Again, take a good look at other engineering articles with External Links subpages to see what I mean.

Dmitri, all of my comments are meant to be constructive and to point you to the way to improve your article. I hope you will accept my comments in that spirit ... that I am trying to help you. Milton Beychok 07:03, 3 March 2010 (UTC) (Engineering Workgroup Editor)

Valery Menshikov wrote some books, for example, the 2009 Valery Menshikov, Michael I. Makarov, Sergey V. Pushkarsky, Russia "Union State Multifunction Space System" Space System Research Institute, Jubileiny, Russia, 2007

Should this book be mentioned? I do not have it in hands.. Dmitrii Kouznetsov 12:15, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Dmitri, if that book is relevant to this article. then you could use it either as a reference to the main article or as a Bibliography book ... but not as both a reference and a Bibliography book. Regards, Milton Beychok 15:48, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Milton, I begin to understand, what are you talking about. Then, at the bibliography page, there should be some Landau,Lifshitz, or some berkeley lectures on physics and so on. Is it correct? Dmitrii Kouznetsov 16:04, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

If I understand your comments, Dmitri, the Russian-language references are not necessarily supportive of the idea. Nevertheless, they aren't accessible to the average reader or relevant Editor.

Yes, I do know what Lysenko did, and, if the Russian scientific press is responding to this as they ideally should have to Lysenko, that is major news in and of itself. Can you think of anything in English that presents this, rather than a string of Russian references?

There is a joke among American dogs and their humans that Pavlov is a psychologist whom dogs taught to ring bells whenever the dogs were thinking of salivating. :-) Howard C. Berkowitz 16:15, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

(Unindent) Dmitri, the Bibliography subpage is primarily for published books and for published scientific/engineering journal articles. Lectures or other material found on the Internet should go into the External Links subpage. Look at the Edit page of this Talk page to see how the following examples were formatted:

Example of a Bibliography subpage book:

• Michael Clugston and Rosalind Flemming (2000). Advanced Chemistry, 1st Edition. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-914633-0. 

Example of a Bibliography subpage journal article:

• M.V. Orna (1980). "Water, the Peculiar Molecule". J. Chem. Ed. 57 (12): 891-892.

Examples of Related Links subpage links:

• Layers of Earth's Atmosphere From the website of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. (UCAR)
• NASA - Student Features - Earth's Atmosphere From the website of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
• Hydrocarbon Systems: Structural Traps From the website of the Paleontological Research Institute (PRI)
• Distillation Lecture Notes by Prof. Randall M. Price at Christian Brothers University

Example of how to use a book as a Main Article reference:

Example of how to use a journal article as a Main Article reference:

Example of how to use an Internet website page as a Main Article reference:

References:

Again, please look at the Edit page of this Talk page to see how the above examples were formatted.

Does this make it clear? Milton Beychok 21:42, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

More clean up

The section about the interest (revival) in inertial propulsion in Russia has been cleaned up and reformatted. There were some highly biased statements about the current socio-political system in the Russian space system. In accordance with Citizendium's policy of maintaining a neutral point of view (NPOV), those statements were deleted. There was also a statement about how much it would cost to maintain the overall Russian space program ... which was irrelevant to the focus of this article on inertial propulsion. Therefore that was also removed. The two quotes, from the Russian Information Agency Novosti and from Pravda were retained along with the references pointing to them.

Finally, the word "Jubileiny" was translated into "Jubilee". Also, the image was shifted to the right side to avoid conflict with the two block quotes.

All that remains now is how to handle all of the Russian language references for the "Criticism" section. I will try to get at that tomorrow, probably using Howard Berkowitz's suggestion to put them into the Bibliography subpage. Milton Beychok 23:31, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

Transfer of the Russian language references about criticism of the Russian inertial propulsion program from the Main article page to the Bibliography page

Dimitri, I have transferred all of your references (except one) about criticisms of the inertial propulsion program to the Bibliography subpage. Your last of those references was simply a copyrighted (and copylefted ??) Russian version as well as an English version of this article as you had initially written it (before all of my edits). I don't understand what that is all about, so I deleted it completely. Have you published this article elsewhere (in Russian or in English) and copyrighted it? Please explain.

Since I cannot read Russian, I am trusting you that the other references which I transferred to the Bibliography page are valid, credible publications and reports. Pleas confirm that. Thanks, Milton Beychok 03:07, 4 March 2010 (UTC)