Average Momentum has no units

I am visiting Sirepo.com for the first time. I came through https://uspas.fnal.gov/resources/downloads.shtml which is NOT a good picture of what you are doing. And they are not doing a very good job at what they say they want to do, partly as a consequence of your lack of focus.

Looking at the free version, Los Alamos Proton Accelerator Example. I set the number of particles to 10000 and the proton energy to 25 MeV. The Longitudinal Phase Space panel give this note "< p > = 48.92377" and I would assume that is the average momentum.

My presumption is that your community is made of "free" users just trying things out, or hoping to learn something. Then, with more confidence, or real problems to solve, people commit to more time and money. ( I cannot tell if your cost for computing time are realistic.) But, assuming you are liked thousands of similar sites on the Internet, you are probably ambiguous with respect to newbies. I generally recommend you give them tools to explain EVERYTHING. Hover is good. You could add a Wikipedia type hoverbox for that "< p > = 48.92377" text and explain thing. Actually Wikipedia is more a popup explanation that only works as a button. The hoverbox on Twitter is closer to a true, infinite depth, hoverbox, where every new hoverbox can be hovered, locked, saved and re-arranged.

But every group like this (I have spent years looking at hundreds of groups on GitHub) tends to be volunteers, and have their own individual interests and hobbies and priorities. I cannot take time to fix every weakness on the Internet. I am a "user" just making a comment. You should, at least on the "free" version, have a reporting form, NOT dump them directly into GitHub which is a completely different environment, and (to my experience) not really aimed at best collaborative practices for user).

Your axes in the examples, and during "real" models and simulations, ought to always be deeply explained. And all the associated background papers, the source code of the calculations (with trace) ought to be there for people to learn, reviewers to verify, and members of collaborations to efficiently work with for large projects that might include tens of thousands of workers with many different skills and levels.

I have been studying the Internet every day for the last 25 years, with particular focus on global issues facing the human species - things like "global climate change", "covid". Here this fits into "clean nuclear energy" in a broad sense, but "particle electrodynamics" too. I look to see what groups use as organizing principles, how they enable (or often do things that stop)collaboration. The groups that get to about 10,000 core workers tend to stagnate. That is because of myriad things like "you did not label you units and dimensions", "you did not share the equations of this submodel in SI units and in symbolic form with tools to compile and verify this set of equations." I have a hundreds of things that I check and hundreds of thousands of variations "why it is 1000 times slower than it ought to be".

I am just saying hello. I found some nice work on cyclotrons. Last week I was going through many of the "high harmonic gain" laser XUV and soft x-ray groups. And some electron beam + laser modulation groups. Most of this stuff is easily understood by anyone - if you explain the terms, units, equations, data sources, measurement processes, and assumption -- in context, immediately, completely and FAST. One unexplained term in a paper or model can stop or delay. For instance, I had to spend almost a minute figuring out the geometry for the Longitudinal Phase Space view. If I could just hover and see "show me where the observer is with respect to the instrument" I could save time. As it is, I have to drag around an ambiguity, when I would rather just look at the results and play with improving the focus, which I consider horrible.

I like what you are trying to do. But I can tell you that you ought to write your own collaborators interface. NOT use raw GitHub. The GitHub owners do not care about your goals. The staff are not really allowed to help. And, you are investing a lot of your time generating content in GitHub world, which is probably not going to be easily portable. If you grow to $Billion scale, you will have to. You will not be able to get to $Trillion, you just are not organized well enough

I took over TheInternetFoundation.Org from Network Solutions in July 1998 after the original Internet Foundation was cancelled. It was supposed to look at the purposes, methods and best practices for global collaborations on the really hard problems facing the human species. Or fairly simple to state problems like "running cities", "designing atomic powered rockets", "solar system colonization". "nutritional food for all", "open global lifetime learning assistance for all". Those kinds of things. You know them to be possible, otherwise y ou would not even try to do this. I found it because I saw it was partially sponsored by government funding. I am checking to see if groups are hoarding for personal gain things they developed under contract. I do not bother to fix those things, but I want to know their prevalence and ramifications. Self-policing is better for groups than rules and regulations.

I filed this in my notes under "Yet another group trying to make a living writing software for scientific and technical modeling and design"

All I am asking is for you to change "free" to something like "A Learning Assistant for people who would like to work with high energies and new technologies". There are about 2 Billion kids now from 4 to 24 in the world learning for the first time. And several billion who are working at other things, but who might well want to work on these sorts of things too. I have been deeply reviewing GPT3 and GPT4 to see if there is any way to drag them into really open world and to be conscientious about sharing and open collaboration. I strongly recommend not trusting them, until they can give complete trace on where their information comes from. Most of the MANY mistakes in many different fields, particularly math and science and computing, these current "AIs" use is from lack of formal training in those fields. And "generate word sequences that sound plausible" should be replaced with "give verifiable and best answers to everything - in partnership with humans".

I would have filed this under "gravitational engineering" except your examples are about 40 times too small magnetic fields.

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation

radiasoft / sirepo

Average Momentum has no units #5585