Saturday, January 24, 2009

Hyperphysically existing "stuff"

I recently was looking for a good definition of "universe". Google naturally brought me to Wikipedia, and I found its definition: "everything that physically exists" (the definition went on to specify "the entirety of space and time, all forms of matter, energy and momentum, and the physical laws and physical constants that govern them", but the list of examples seems unnecessary). The word "physically" also seemed out of place, and the fact that it linked to the article on physics made it hard for me to understand what was meant by it.

I decided to go through the history to see how this definition had formed. A quick check revealed that the definition had been, for some while, "everything that exists". This seems a much better definition, and I managed to trace the change back to a single anonymous user. On December 19, 2007, an anonymous user editing from 72.151.50.172 added the word "physically", with the edit summary scientific multiverse hypotheses include the possibility of hyperphysically existing "stuff". In the year since this edit, no one seems to have thought to challenge it.

A little bit of investigation into this IP suggests that this editor is the same as User:Standonbible, a college freshman who relies heavily on the Bible and admits that editors often assume he is "a POV-pushing religious fanatic". He gives a list of reasons he "often get[s] labeled a lunatic", which I'll let you go to his user page to read. But for all of 2008, and continuing to this day, he helped write the lead sentence on the Wikipedia article on the universe.

By the way, the definition of "universe" in Wiktionary is "The sum of everything that exists in the cosmos, including time and space itself". Again with the unnecessary examples, and this time with the unnecessary "in the cosmos". The latter addition is particularly silly, since the Wiktionary definition of "cosmos" is "the universe". At least there doesn't seem to be any pseudoscientific POV pushing in this definition, though.

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