I'm so bad at (physical) science I had to see if "simple" Wikipedia had an entry for this because I couldn't follow it at all and.. it does! :-) https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negative_temperature
>Use Basic English words and shorter sentences. This allows people to understand complex terms or phrases. > Write good pages. The best encyclopedia pages have useful, well-written information. > Use the pages to learn and teach. These pages can help people learn English. You can also use them to make a new Wikipedia to help other people. > Simple does not mean short. Writing in Simple English means that simple words are used. It does not mean readers want basic information. Articles do not have to be short to be simple; expand articles, add details, but use basic vocabulary.
https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
It's true you might find a explanation on SEW that you find simpler or easier than on the regular English Wikipedia page, and this might (or might not) be because the constraint of using simple English forces it. However, there is no reason this explanation could not also be put in the regular English Wikipedia page. So you should be bold and consider improving the regular English Wikipedia if you find it inaccessible to the intended audience.
Sure, but the use of simple language commonly seems to play out in easier to follow explanations of things on Simple Wikipedia.
So you should be bold and consider improving the regular English Wikipedia if you find it inaccessible to the intended audience.
I appreciate your confidence, but I find the topic almost unintelligible. I dare say a science educator or the like would make a more reliable job of it. Plus, I'm not sure articles should be dumbed down, because for topics I do understand, I would find it annoying if Wikipedia entries were boiled down into layman's terms.
I do agree the two correlate, though, even though I think you could use simple language to describe complex topics without losing information.
I explicitly acknowledged this in my comment: "It's true you might find a explanation on SEW that you find simpler or easier than on the regular English Wikipedia page, and this might (or might not) be because the constraint of using simple English forces it."
> I appreciate your confidence, but I find the topic almost unintelligible. I dare say a science educator or the like would make a more reliable job of it. Plus, I'm not sure articles should be dumbed down, because for topics I do understand, I would find it annoying if Wikipedia entries were boiled down into layman's terms.
The article should be intelligible to its intended audience. If that audience includes non-experts, the article should include descriptions that are intelligible to non-experts. This does not require removing expert-level descriptions, although it is good to warn the reader of what sections can be understood at what level. Depending on the circumstance, it may also be appropriate to split the discussion into two articles, as is done with the Introduction to Quantum Mechanics and Quantum Mechanics articles:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Introduction_to_quantum_mechan...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_mechanics
There are some articles on Wikipedia that are essentially only of interest to experts, and here it is probably not worth the effort to make them accessible, but the Negative Temperatures article is not one of them. It should include laymen understandable descriptions in addition to ones more useful to experts.
I must again emphasize: Simple English Wikipedia is for Simple English language. It's not Non-Technical Wikipedia and it's not for dumbing down anything. If something's not appropriate for the regular English Wikipedia, it's not appropriate for Simple English Wikipedia.
It's like I understand the individual words like phase, canonical and coordinates, but the combination is... an entirely different field of study.
Phase space is jargon for the set of all allowed configurations of a system. In the simplest case, an ideal gas of n spherical atoms, each atom is specified by 3 independent numbers for position and 3 for momentum, so you need 6 n numbers total to specify the whole configuration... That is the phase space. This phase space is only partly bounded, it is bounded in position (V^n where V is the volume each particle can occupy) but not in momentum (the temperature can always go higher). Because each of these numbers can vary independently from each other, they are called “independent degrees of freedom.”
Now, point vortices are an abstract mathematical limit of physical vortices as they get really small. Generally we take these mathematical limits because it's much easier to work with and we are lazy. The article is saying that Onsager chose to explain his theory with point vortices because you can't give them arbitrarily high momentums, in fact their positions have to be tied up with where they are going, so that they are not independent anymore like they were with the gas.
So Onsager knew that if he chose this system then the boundary on volume (well, area, the vortices live in 2D) would become a boundary on momentum space and then you couldn't dump infinite energy into the system. And this is important because it means that when you add more energy, the number of allowed configurations with that energy eventually shrinks. This is the negativity of negative temperature, increase something and something else decreases. The thing that is decreasing, a volume in phase space, is also called the entropy. Increase energy, and entropy decreases... most normal systems work the opposite way, entropy increases.
As systems share things to maximize total entropy, this overcharged vortex system is going to share energy with any normal system at any temperature, because that normal system will increase its entropy with energy coming into it, and the overcharged vortex system will gain entropy when it loses energy. So it is hotter than any other thing in the world.
(I am erasing the jargon word “canonical” from this explanation... It just refers to a particular procedure we use to define momentum coordinates based on your position coordinates. When you are not dealing with a point particle with defined mass in a flat space, you have to make these sorts of choices.)
PS If you ever see something like that on regular Wikipedia, please add the {{Jargon}} tag to it. In theory, at some point, some editor might come and make it better.
Only very small things discussed in quantum mechanics can reach this state.