Talk:Objections to the theory of loop quantum gravity

message: Hello Gentlemen! What about keeping these two pages (loop quantum gravity, loop gravity) as separate? LQG - which is obviously the more frequent name - could be dedicated purely to the viewpoints of those who happily work on LQG, while LG could collect more observations of others. The pages would refer to each other, much like they do now, and the POV labels could be removed. --Lumidek 12:25, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Well, that is not the orthodox way of doing things. I think, in the end, there should probably be one page, not 'prosecution' and 'defence'. However, I won't insist on anything like that right now. Charles Matthews 16:03, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: It is never OK for an article to be POV. Yes, it does matter that it's true, but it is just as important that you present multiple viewpoints. Mike∞Storm 22:00, 11 Sep 2004 (UTC)
replies: text:  *choke*... whoever had the nerve to say that people like Ashtekar are not good physicists, quite plainly do not have a clue about general relativity. They also may have no clue about algebraic quantum field theory. — Miguel 10:26, 2004 Nov 22 (UTC)
The first three sentences are pure polemic. 
Charles Matthews 10:44, 13 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: That is the most POV paragraph that I have ever seen. Mike∞Storm 02:04, 14 Sep 2004 (UTC)

text: I have no problem with objections to loop quantum gravity, but one of my main questions is: Why was this page created at all? Wouldn't a better name have been "Objections to Loop Quantum Gravity"? And then, it still should be merged with the main Loop quantum gravity article. Mike∞Storm 00:11, 17 Sep 2004 (UTC)

message: Guys, I'm completely dumb in the subject but I feel the article is simply too big. May be we should move most of it to something like Loop quantum gravity versus string theory? And let's decide upon quantum gravity and loop quantum gravity articles -- they should be something like merged with this article. Having three articles with much similar content is really strange. I believe with can do it in a bloodless way.
:Disagree, having looked around. Loop quantum gravity at 42K is already longer than WP likes. It has various articles hanging off it, and I've done the work required to make this another of those. Further, quantum gravity is not something that should be merged into an article on a particular theory: it should be a top-level article setting the general scene. So in a sense I'm coming closer to what User:Lumidek suggested, just because this seems to be generating a great deal of interesting writing. Still needs work, of course. Charles Matthews 11:26, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  [[Loop quantum gravity versus string theory]] 

message: While this is a brilliant essay, it is still not a NPOV encyclopedic article. If I really have to point out specific sentences, let's start with: While string theory smells by God, loop quantum gravity smells by Man. --Pjacobi 15:22, 10 Oct 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: What was nonsense? lysdexia 00:13, 17 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  NPOV 

message: Hi, I've just removed a large section on String theorists' critisicm of LQG from Quantum gravity. While the text from there was generally worser than this text, it contained an introductory paragraph that I feel is very useful:
: Lubos Motl is a string theorist who is highly critical of loop quantum gravity. On sci.physics.research/What's wrong with loop quantum gravity, Lubos debated Steve Carlip and John Baez, and offered the following criticisms of loop quantum gravity.
because it clearly indicates whose are the view expressed and where one can continue debates (because Wikipedia is of another purpose). I suggest that we insert it here. 193.124.225.253 16:21, 13 Oct 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Paragraph from Quantum Gravity 

message: Well, maybe this page will need to evolve further. I anticipate that there may be some replies to objections written here in the future. Charles Matthews 07:18, 23 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Right to reply

message: Dear Tweet Tweet, could you please be a little bit more specific and say something about this actual page, instead of just putting bombastically sounding labels here? --Lumidek 02:11, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: My corrections are not meaningless or very confused. Tweet Tweet 02:49, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)

text: I'm agnostic about both LQG and string theory. I'm simply pointing out that the objections on this page are not all that reasonable. And why should there be a page full of mostly unfounded attacks on LQG and we're not supposed to answer these objections? And as for other physicists, it appears Lubos Motl is the only person with these objections. I also don't see what you are referring to about my philosophical objections since I'm not aware of discussing philosophy in my corrections. And if you claim my "questions" have very simple and rigorously known answers, can you list them here for all of us to inspect? Tweet Tweet 02:54, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Controversial tag 

message: I am now trying to separate each section into a clearly-labelled OBJECTION, and brief REPLY. It is clearly not adequate for 'replies', which of course should be allowed here, to be written into the OBJECTION section. I'm asking for co-operation in keeping to this format (like a medieval disputation), since it seems unlikely that the differences can be resolved.
Please, no mass reverts, and edit section by section until we get the sections into readable statements.
Charles Matthews 11:42, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Disputation approach

message: The recent editing re-instates my belief, that LQP and OtttoLQP must be merged, otherwise each faction tends to believe they "own" "their" article. On other topics, POV splits of articles aren't tolerated and I don't know why LQP should be different. The project which has one article per POV is called WikInfo. --Pjacobi 17:24, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: Heavens, it gets worse: After OBJECTION and REPLY, we've got CLARIFICATION. The Wikipedia is not the place to battle out scientific research, see also Wikipedia:No original research. --Pjacobi 18:07, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Back to the <nowiki>{{merge}}</nowiki>label? 

message: Lumidek has been writing everywhere that I'm vandalizing this page, which is not what I'm doing. I'm trying to reply to his objections. Tweet Tweet 23:57, 29 Nov 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  This isn't vandalism!!!!!!!!!!!!! 

message: "The S-matrix is believed to be essentially the only gauge-invariant observable in quantum gravity, and any meaningful theory of quantum gravity should allow us to calculate it, at least in principle."
:Do you have any reference for this claim of yours? Tweet Tweet 23:55, 19 Dec 2004 (UTC)
replies: text: This is a sort of well-known lore. Every week, there is a paper that talks about these issues. For example, 10 minutes ago (today), a new preprint by Raphael Bousso appeared  - it's called Cosmology and S-matrix. It says that the S-matrix is the observable that we know how makes sense, and he tries to make some sense of it in nontrivial cosmological backgrounds, with mixed results. See also basic textbooks, e.g. page 97 of Polchinski volume I. These statements about the S-matrix are especially meant to express the fact that the local Green's functions of metric are not gauge-invariant, and quantum gravity is only well-defined on-shell. One could define some very non-covariant complicated gauge-invariant observables, but no doubt, they would be even much harder to calculate than the S-matrix. --Lumidek 01:12, 20 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  S-matrix