User:Christopher Thomas

Image:Christopher-Thomas-wikipedia.jpg

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.

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.

• Antimatter rocket, April 2007. Full rewrite of the article ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Antimatter_rocket&diff=119650753&oldid=99105697 diff]).

• Event horizon, June/July 2006. Full rewrite of the article ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Event_horizon&diff=61763004&oldid=61415548 diff]) ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk%3AEvent_horizon&diff=61763131&oldid=60235098 discussion]).

• Degenerate matter, February 2006. Partial rewrite and stub-filling ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Degenerate_matter&diff=40986267&oldid=40804093 diff]).

• Neutronium, November 2005. Rewrote ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Neutronium&diff=28140618&oldid=27048297 diff]).

• Negative energy, May 2005, November 2005. Replaced gibberish with a disambiguation page ([http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Negative_energy&diff=28093073&oldid=14268334 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.

{{main|User:Christopher Thomas/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.

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

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

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.

These are mostly for my own reference.

• Brain-dump of suggested colonization approaches for the [http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/THINKSTARSHIP ThinkStarship] project on WikiBooks.

• Record of my efforts at reconciling several fringe science articles with Wikipedia's policies on viewpoint.

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