User:Christopher Thomas

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I am on intermittent wikipedia-sabbatical. As of spring 2015, I'm on full sabbatical. I still periodically check for messages left in my talk page, and can be contacted via the "email this user" feature for urgent matters.

The most important aspect of participating in Wikipedia is being able to work with others. All other qualifications, including expertise or knowledge in a field, are secondary to that one.

There will come a time when you disagree with community consensus, and you know that you are right, and it's about something important. The correct thing to do is to respect community consensus anyways.

Biography

I am an academic who dabbles in coding, electronics, and bizzare design puzzles.

Hobbies include reading fiction and non-fiction, engineering and physics problems, and pencil-and-paper role-playing games.

I have completed my PhD and a post-doctoral fellowship and am in the process of transitioning to an industry career.

My contributions to Wikipedia primarily involve physics, though my editing habits have been broader in the past.

Editing To-Do List

I follow Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics, and help with editing problematic articles on an occasional basis. Articles on my to-do list are shown below:

Nothing on the list at present, as I'm on sabbatical.

(To do eventually: turn the don't debate the validity of X here blurb into a proper general template.)

If you want me to look at a specific article, please add a comment to my talk page. Most physics-related articles should be posted to WT:PHYS instead, however.

Selected noteworthy edits

Antimatter rocket, April 2007. Full rewrite of the article (diff).

Event horizon, June/July 2006. Full rewrite of the article (diff) (discussion).

Degenerate matter, February 2006. Partial rewrite and stub-filling (diff).

Neutronium, November 2005. Rewrote (diff).

Negative energy, May 2005, November 2005. Replaced gibberish with a disambiguation page (diff). I'd originally redirected to exotic matter; I changed this to a disambiguation page after a sufficiently strong case was made for doing so.

Selected image contributions

Image:Bh-light-cones-1.png and Image:Bh-radar-radar-pulse.png, December 2005. Intended as placeholders for better versions of these figures at black hole.
Image:Hcube_fold.gif, June 2006. Animation of folding and unfolding of hypercube and cube nets, in response to a question on talk:tesseract.
Image:Event-horizon-particle.png, June 2006. Spacetime diagram of a uniformly accelerating particle, and the light cone of an event that's outside its event horizon, for a proposed rewritten version of event horizon.
Image:Gr-temp-positive.gif, Image:Gr-temp-negative.gif, Image:Gr-temp-surfaces.png, July 2006. Animations and diagrams showing how world lines converge in positively curved spacetime and diverge in negatively curved spacetime.
Image:Aerovator-forces-polar.png, July 2006. Force diagram for a segment of an aerovator ribbon.
Image:Ftl-time-travel-equivalence.gif, March 2007. Animated, subtitled spacetime diagram showing the equivalence of FTL travel and time travel under special relativity. Warning: large file.
Image:Forward-sailcraft-scheme.png, August 2009. Diagram of the light sail decelleration scheme proposed by Robert L. Forward.

Useful links

Tools

Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics -- Physics articles with problems can be flagged for attention here.

Wikipedia policy pages

Wikipedia:Dispute resolution -- This outlines the steps people are expected to take when experiencing conflicts with other editors.

Essays and scratchwork

Draft essays

At some point I may try to turn some of these into proper wiki-essays. Please don't modify the user-space versions.

Suggestions for staying sane while editing Wikipedia. This is why I (usually) don't hate editing after being here this long.

How to productively work with fringe science articles.

How to tell reputable research papers from less-reputable ones.

Miscellaneous scratchwork

These are mostly for my own reference.

Brain-dump of suggested colonization approaches for the ThinkStarship project on WikiBooks.