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Buster Keaton

Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton (October 4, 1895 – February 1, 1966) was an American actor, comedian and film director. He is best known for his silent films during the 1920s, in which he performed physical comedy and inventive stunts. He frequently maintained a stoic, deadpan facial expression that became his trademark and earned him the nickname "The Great Stone Face".

Keaton was a child vaudeville star, performing as part of his family's traveling act. As an adult, he began working with independent producer Joseph M. Schenck and filmmaker Edward F. Cline, with whom he made a series of successful two-reel comedies in the early 1920s, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922). He then moved to feature-length films; several of them, such as Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), and The Cameraman (1928), remain highly regarded. The General is perhaps his most acclaimed work; Orson Welles considered it "the greatest comedy ever made...and perhaps the greatest film ever made".

Keaton's career declined after 1928, when he signed with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and lost his artistic independence. His first wife divorced him, and he descended into alcoholism. He was fired from MGM in 1933, ending his career as a leading man in feature films. He recovered in the 1940s, marrying Eleanor Norris and working as an honored comic performer until the end of his life. During this period, he made cameos in Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (1952), Samuel Beckett's Film (1965) and a variety of television programs. He earned an Academy Honorary Award in 1959.

Critic Roger Ebert wrote of Keaton's "extraordinary period from 1920 to 1929" when he "worked without interruption" as having made him "the greatest actor-director in the history of the movies". In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, stating that "his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur." In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him as the 21st-greatest male star of classic Hollywood cinema.

Early life in vaudeville

Keaton was born into a vaudeville family in Piqua, Kansas, the small town which his mother, Myra Keaton (née Cutler), was visiting at the time. He was named Joseph to continue a tradition on his father's side (he was sixth in a line bearing the name Joseph Keaton) and Frank for his maternal grandfather, who disapproved of his parents' union. His father was Joseph Hallie "Joe" Keaton who had a traveling show called the Mohawk Indian Medicine Company, which performed on stage and sold patent medicine on the side. According to a frequently repeated story, which may be apocryphal, Keaton acquired the nickname Buster at the age of 18 months. After the child fell down a long flight of stairs without injury, an actor friend named George Pardey remarked, "Gee whiz, he's a regular buster!" After this, Keaton's father began to use the nickname to refer to the youngster. Keaton retold the anecdote over the years, including in a 1964 interview with the CBC's Telescope. In Keaton's retelling, he was six months old when the incident occurred, and Harry Houdini gave him the nickname (though the family did not get to know Houdini until later).

At the age of three, Keaton began performing with his parents in The Three Keatons. He first appeared on stage in 1899 in Wilmington, Delaware. The act was mainly a comedy sketch. Myra played the saxophone to one side, while Joe and Keaton performed center stage, both wearing slapsoles, bald-headed wigs and "Irish" beards. The young Keaton goaded his father by disobeying him, and the elder Keaton responded by throwing him against the scenery, into the orchestra pit, or even into the audience. A suitcase handle was sewn into Keaton's clothing to aid with the constant tossing. The act evolved as Keaton learned to take trick falls safely; he was rarely injured or bruised on stage. This knockabout style of comedy led to accusations of child abuse, and occasionally, arrest. However, Keaton was always able to show the authorities that he had no bruises or broken bones. He was eventually billed as "The Little Boy Who Can't Be Damaged", and the overall act as "The Roughest Act That Was Ever in the History of the Stage". Decades later, Keaton said that he was never hurt by his father and that the falls and physical comedy were a matter of proper technical execution. In 1914, he told the Detroit News: "The secret is in landing limp and breaking the fall with a foot or a hand. It's a knack. I started so young that landing right is second nature with me. Several times I'd have been killed if I hadn't been able to land like a cat. Imitators of our act don't last long, because they can't stand the treatment."

Keaton said he had so much fun that he sometimes began laughing as his father threw him across the stage. Noticing that this caused the audience to laugh less, he adopted his famous deadpan expression when performing. The act ran up against laws banning child performers in vaudeville. According to one biographer, Keaton was made to go to school while performing in New York, but only attended for part of one day. Despite tangles with the law, Keaton was a rising and relatively well-paid star in the theater. He stated that he learned to read and write late, and was taught by his mother. By the time he was 21, his father's alcoholism threatened the reputation of the family act, so Keaton and his mother, Myra, left for New York, where Keaton's career quickly moved from vaudeville to film.

Keaton served in the American Expeditionary Forces in France with the United States Army's 40th Infantry Division during World War I. His unit remained intact and was not broken up to provide replacements, as happened to some other late-arriving divisions. During his time in uniform, he developed an ear infection that permanently impaired his hearing.

Silent film era
Keaton spent the summers of 1908–1916 "at the 'Actor's Colony' in the Bluffton neighborhood of Muskegon, along with other famous vaudevillians."

In February 1917, he met Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle at the Talmadge Studios in New York City, where Arbuckle was under contract to Joseph M. Schenck. Joe Keaton disapproved of films, and Keaton also had reservations about the medium. During his first meeting with Arbuckle, he was asked to jump in and start acting. Keaton was such a natural in his first film, The Butcher Boy, he was hired on the spot. At the end of the day, he asked to borrow one of the cameras to get a feel for how it worked. He took the camera back to his hotel room where he dismantled and reassembled it by morning. Keaton later said that he was soon Arbuckle's second director and his entire gag department. He appeared in a total of 14 Arbuckle shorts, running into 1920. They were popular, and contrary to Keaton's later reputation as "The Great Stone Face", he often smiled and even laughed in them. Keaton and Arbuckle became close friends, and Keaton was one of few people, along with Charlie Chaplin, to defend Arbuckle's character during accusations that he was responsible for the death of actress Virginia Rappe. (Arbuckle was eventually acquitted, with an apology from the jury for the ordeal he underwent. )

In 1920, The Saphead was released, in which Keaton had his first starring role in a full-length feature. It was based on a successful play, The New Henrietta, which had already been filmed once, under the title The Lamb, with Douglas Fairbanks playing the lead. After Keaton's successful work with Arbuckle, Schenck gave him his own production unit, Buster Keaton Productions. He made a series of 19 two-reel comedies, including One Week (1920), The Playhouse (1921), Cops (1922), and The Electric House (1922). Keaton then moved to full-length features. Keaton's writers included Clyde Bruckman, Joseph Mitchell, and Jean Havez, but the most ingenious gags were generally conceived by Keaton himself. Comedy director Leo McCarey, recalling the freewheeling days of making slapstick comedies, said, "All of us tried to steal each other's gagmen. But we had no luck with Keaton because he thought up his best gags himself and we couldn't steal him!" The more adventurous ideas called for dangerous stunts, performed by Keaton at great physical risk. During the railroad water-tank scene in Sherlock Jr. (gags written by Clyde Bruckman), Keaton broke his neck when a torrent of water fell on him from a water tower, but he did not realize it until years afterwards. A scene from Steamboat Bill, Jr. required Keaton to stand still on a particular spot. Then, the facade of a two-story building toppled forward on top of Keaton. Keaton's character emerged unscathed, due to a single open window. The stunt required precision, because the prop house weighed two tons, and the window only offered a few inches of clearance around Keaton's body. The sequence furnished one of the most memorable images of his career.

Aside from Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), Keaton's most enduring feature-length films include Three Ages (1923), Our Hospitality (1923), The Navigator (1924), Sherlock Jr. (1924), Seven Chances (1925), The Cameraman (1928), and The General (1926). The General, set during the American Civil War, combined physical comedy with Keaton's love of trains, including an epic locomotive chase. Employing picturesque locations, the film's storyline reenacted an actual wartime incident. Though it would come to be regarded as Keaton's greatest achievement, the film received mixed reviews at the time. It was too dramatic for some filmgoers expecting a lightweight comedy, and reviewers questioned Keaton's judgment in making a comedic film about the Civil War, even while noting it had a "few laughs."

It was an expensive misfire (the climactic scene of a locomotive plummeting through a burning bridge was the most expensive single shot in silent-film history), and Keaton was never entrusted with total control over his films again. His distributor, United Artists, insisted on a production manager who monitored expenses and interfered with certain story elements. Keaton endured this treatment for two more feature films, and then exchanged his independent setup for employment at Hollywood's biggest studio, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM). Keaton's loss of independence as a filmmaker coincided with the coming of sound films (although he was interested in making the transition) and mounting personal problems, and his career in the early sound era was hurt as a result.

New studio, new problems

Keaton's last three features had been produced and released independently, under Keaton's control, and fell short of financial expectations at the box office. In 1928 film executive Nicholas Schenck arranged a deal with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer for Keaton's services. Keaton had little to say about the details of the MGM contract; he would no longer have any financial responsibility for his films, and even his salary had been pre-negotiated, without his own input. Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd advised him against making the move, cautioning that he would lose his independence. But, given Schenck's desire to keep things "in the family" and Keaton's having to admit that his independent pictures hadn't done well, Keaton agreed to sign with MGM. He would later cite this as the worst business decision of his life in his autobiography.

Welcomed to the studio by Irving Thalberg, with whom he initially had a relationship of mutual admiration, Keaton realized too late that the studio system MGM represented would severely limit his creative input. The giant studio was run along strict factory lines, with everything planned and budgeted in advance. The first of MGM's Keaton films was The Cameraman (1928), and Keaton sensed trouble immediately when he saw the script. "It was as long as War and Peace," Keaton recalled. "I took out 40 useless characters and a couple of subplots. These guys didn't realize—they still don't realize—that the best comedies are simple. I said, 'I'd like to do something with a drunk and a fat lady and a kid. Get 'em for me.' At my studio they would have the characters I wanted in 10 minutes. But not MGM. You had to requisition a toothpick in triplicate. I just stood there, and everybody is hassling." MGM wanted only Keaton the star, Keaton the creator was considered a waste of time and money because "in the time it took him to develop a project, he could have appeared in two or three pictures set up by the studio's production staff."

When the studio began making talking films, Keaton was enthused about the new technology and wanted to make his next film, Spite Marriage, with sound. MGM refused, because the film was more valuable in silent form; it could be shown around the world in theaters that had not converted to sound. Also, soundstages were then at a premium, and MGM usually reserved them for dramatic productions. MGM also forced Keaton to use a stunt double during some of the more dangerous scenes to protect its investment, something he had never done in his heyday: "Stuntmen don't get you laughs," Keaton had said.

In the first Keaton pictures with sound, he and his fellow actors would shoot each scene three times: once in English, once in Spanish, and once in either French or German. The actors would phonetically memorize the foreign-language scripts a few lines at a time and shoot immediately after. This is discussed in the TCM documentary Buster Keaton: So Funny it Hurt, with Keaton complaining about having to shoot lousy films not just once, but three times.

Keaton kept trying to persuade his bosses to let him do things his way. Production head Irving Thalberg would not permit Keaton to create a script from scratch because the studio had already purchased a stage property dating from 1917, Parlor, Bedroom and Bath, at the suggestion of Lawrence Weingarten, who was Thalberg's brother-in-law and Keaton's producer. ("We were desperate. We didn't know what to do," recalled Weingarten.) However, Thalberg did allow Keaton to stage the gags, including long stretches of pantomime, and agreed to send a crew to Keaton's own mansion for exterior shots. Keaton's relative freedom during this project resulted in a better than usual film. "Apart from its exceptional quality," writes biographer James Curtis, "the big takeaway from Parlor, Bedroom and Bath was its extraordinary commercial success. Performing better at the box office than any of Keaton's other MGM talkies, it pulled in worldwide rentals of $985,000 [$20,694,850 in 2024]. With a yield [net profit] of $299,000 [$6,281,990 in 2024], it became the most profitable of all of Buster Keaton's features, silent or sound." Curtis notes that it was also the only one of his MGM features that came in under budget and ahead of schedule.

The next project confirmed Keaton's fears about studio interference. He was handed a script titled Sidewalks of New York (1932), in which he played a millionaire becoming involved with a slum-neighborhood girl and a gang of rowdy kids. Keaton thought the premise was totally unsuitable, and was uncomfortable with his directors Jules White and Zion Myers, who emphasized blunt slapstick. "I went over (Weingarten's) head and appealed to Irving Thalberg to help get me out of the assignment. Irving was usually on my side, but this time he said, 'Larry likes it. Everybody else in the studio likes the story. You are the only one who doesn't.' In the end, I gave up like a fool and said 'what the hell?' Who was I to say I was right and everyone was wrong?" The film's emphasis on obvious slapstick made it unsuitable for the usual, prestigious Broadway premiere -- it opened simultaneously in two New York side-street theaters -- but the less discriminating audiences in small towns across America flocked to the film, resulting in an ultimate success.

MGM had been featuring comical musician Cliff Edwards in Keaton's films. The studio replaced Edwards, who had substance-abuse problems, with nightclub comedian Jimmy Durante. The laconic Keaton and the rambunctious Durante offered enough contrast to function as a team, resulting in three very successful films: Speak Easily (1932), The Passionate Plumber (1932), and What! No Beer? (1933).

Behind the scenes there was trouble. In March 1932 studio chief Louis B. Mayer's office requested Keaton to report for work on a Saturday afternoon, to go through the motions of filming a scene for studio visitors. Keaton already had plans to attend a local college-baseball championship, where he was to be the home-team mascot. He sent his regrets to Mayer's office and kept his date at the ball game, only to receive a warning from Mayer the following Tuesday, suspending his pay until he resumed working.

Keaton's behavior had become erratic by 1932, despondent over working conditions at the studio, and over his wife's antagonism toward him at home. This affected his films; he was sometimes visibly intoxicated on- and off-camera. "I got to the stage where I didn't give a darn whether school kept or not, and then I started drinking too much," Keaton told interviewer Tony Thomas. "When I found out that they could write stories and material better than I could anyway, what was the use of my fighting with them?" The demoralized Keaton couldn't turn to production chief Irving Thalberg for support, because Thalberg was then on a medical leave that lasted eight months. This left Louis B. Mayer temporarily in sole charge of the studio, which made Keaton's standing at MGM even more fragile. Keaton's absences were costing the company $3,000 a day.

The last straw came when Mayer "raided" Keaton's dressing room during a wild party with Keaton's "cronies and their girlfriends". MGM staffer Sam Marx remembered the outcome: "Buster ordered him out of the trailer, and Mayer ordered him out of the studio." Mayer couldn't oust him immediately, because Keaton's latest picture wasn't yet finished. Immediately after Keaton completed retakes on ''What! No Beer?'', he was fired "for good and sufficient cause" in a letter signed by Mayer on February 2, 1933. Keaton had been considered to appear in the studio's all-star success Grand Hotel, only to have his role of the consumptive Kringelein taken by Lionel Barrymore. As ''What! No Beer?'' was nearing completion, Keaton—"sober, shaved, and calm" as Keaton told his biographer Rudi Blesh—pitched an idea to Irving Thalberg. He wanted to make a feature-length parody of Grand Hotel with an all-comedy cast: himself in the Lionel Barrymore role, Jimmy Durante in the John Barrymore role, Marie Dressler in the Greta Garbo role, Polly Moran in the Joan Crawford role, Henry Armetta in the Jean Hersholt role, Edward Everett Horton in the Lewis Stone role, and Laurel and Hardy sharing the Wallace Beery role. Edward Sedgwick would be directing. Keaton called his version Grand Mills Hotel (after the Mills Hotel, a Bowery flophouse). Thalberg was hesitant about burlesquing the dignified studio's own work but, seeing Keaton's obvious disappointment, said he'd think about it.

After Louis B. Mayer had fired Keaton, Thalberg returned to the studio and persuaded Mayer that Keaton was still valuable to the company. Thalberg tried to resurrect Keaton's MGM career by offering to go ahead with the Grand Hotel satire, now retitled Gland Hotel. Keaton, still furious at Mayer, refused to return to the studio and Mayer was not about to apologize. So ended Buster Keaton's starring career in feature films.

European productions
In 1934, Keaton accepted an offer to make an independent film in Paris, Le Roi des Champs-Élysées; it was not released in the United States. During this period, he made another film in England, The Invader. No Hollywood studio would release the film, and it was finally released in 1936 (as An Old Spanish Custom) by a small film-import firm based in New York.

Educational Pictures
Upon Keaton's return to Hollywood in 1934, he made a screen comeback in two-reel comedies for Educational Pictures. Most of these 20-minute shorts are simple visual comedies, with many of the gags supplied by Keaton himself, often recycling ideas from his family vaudeville act and his earlier films. Keaton had a free hand in staging the films, within the studio's budgetary limits and using its staff writers. The Educational two-reelers have far more pantomime than his earlier talkies, and Keaton is in good form throughout. The high point in the Educational series is Grand Slam Opera (1936), featuring Keaton in his own screenplay as an amateur-hour contestant.

The Educational series was very well received by theater owners and movie audiences, and Keaton was the studio's most important comedian. He was also its most expensive comedian (earning $2,500 per film), and when Educational was forced to economize in 1937, the company could no longer afford to maintain two studios. Educational closed its Hollywood studio, thus forfeiting Keaton's services, and kept its cheaper New York studio going. The company replaced Keaton with New York-based stage star Willie Howard.

Gag writer
After Keaton's Educational series lapsed, he returned to MGM as a gag writer, supplying material for the final three Marx Brothers MGM films: At the Circus (1939), Go West (1940), and The Big Store (1941); these were not as artistically successful as the Marxes' previous MGM features. Keaton also directed three one-reel novelty shorts for the studio, but these did not result in further directorial assignments.

Columbia Pictures
In 1939, Columbia Pictures hired Keaton to star in two-reel comedies; he filmed two at a time over two years. These 10 films comprise his last series as a starring comedian. Columbia's short-subject comedians were generally paid a flat fee of $500 per film. Keaton, considered exceptional, was hired at double the usual rate. The director was usually Jules White, whose emphasis on slapstick and farce made most of these films resemble White's famous Three Stooges shorts. White sometimes paired Keaton with a second banana: either veteran comic Monty Collins or raucous comic dancer Elsie Ames. The insistent White directed Keaton whenever possible – to Keaton's mild annoyance – and only two Keaton shorts did without White's services because they were filmed on location, away from the studio. Those remaining two shorts were directed by Del Lord, a former director for Mack Sennett. Keaton's personal favorite was the series' debut, Pest from the West, directed by Lord; it was a shorter, tighter remake of Keaton's little-viewed 1934 feature The Invader. Trade critics loved it. Film Daily raved: "One of the funniest shorts of the season. In fact, of any season. It just goes to prove that this Buster Keaton feller is a natural boxoffice gold mine that is not being mined. When a comedy shown cold in a projection room can make trade press critics howl in their seats, then you can bet your mortgaged theater that it's FUNNY [emphasis theirs]."

Moviegoers and exhibitors welcomed Keaton's Columbia comedies; and when Columbia began reissuing older comedies to theaters in 1948, Keaton's Pest from the West was chosen to launch the "Comedy Favorites" series ("A 1939 Buster Keaton film and one of his funniest," noted Boxoffice. "It is good to see Buster back.") Keaton's Columbia shorts came back to theaters from 1948 to 1952, and again from 1962 to 1964. Author John McElwee reports the boxoffice figures: "Pest from the West, the first series entry in 1939, brought back domestic rentals of $23,000, and subsequent ones tended to hover around that approximate figure (Nothing But Pleasure did $24,000, General Nuisance got $26,000). Columbia also realized profits from reissues of the Keatons after the war. The Spook Speaks was back for the 1949-50 season, and picked up $24,200, this in addition to the $28,500 it had realized on its initial run."

1940s and feature films
Keaton's personal life had stabilized with his 1940 marriage to MGM dancer Eleanor Norris, and now he was taking life a little easier, abandoning Columbia for the less strenuous field of feature films. Resuming his daily job as an MGM gag writer, he provided material for Red Skelton and gave help and advice to Lucille Ball.

Keaton accepted various character roles in both "A" and "B" features. He made his last starring feature, El Moderno Barba Azul (1946), in Mexico; the film was a low-budget production, and it may not have been seen in the United States until its release on VHS in the 1980s, under the title Boom in the Moon. The film has a largely negative reputation, with renowned film historian Kevin Brownlow calling it the worst film ever made.

Critics rediscovered Keaton in 1949 and producers occasionally hired him for bigger "prestige" pictures. He had cameos in such films as In the Good Old Summertime (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). In In the Good Old Summertime, Keaton personally directed the stars Judy Garland and Van Johnson in their first scene together, where they bump into each other on the street. Keaton invented comedy bits where Johnson keeps trying to apologize to a seething Garland, but winds up messing up her hairdo and tearing her dress.

Keaton also appeared in a comedy routine about two inept stage musicians in Charlie Chaplin's Limelight (released in 1952), recalling the vaudeville of The Playhouse. With the exception of Seeing Stars, a minor publicity film produced in 1922, Limelight was the only time in which the two would ever appear together on film.

Television and rediscovery
In 1949, comedian Ed Wynn invited Keaton to appear on his CBS Television comedy-variety show, The Ed Wynn Show, which was televised live on the West Coast. Kinescopes were made for distribution of the programs to other parts of the country, since there was no transcontinental coaxial cable until September 1951. Reaction was strong enough for a local Los Angeles station to offer Keaton his own show, also broadcast live (The Buster Keaton Show, 1950).

Producer Carl Hittleman mounted a new series, again titled The Buster Keaton Show, in 1951. This was an attempt to recreate the first series on film, allowing the program to be broadcast nationwide. The series benefited from a company of veteran actors, including Marcia Mae Jones as the ingenue, Iris Adrian, Dick Wessel, Fuzzy Knight, Dub Taylor, Philip Van Zandt, and his silent-era contemporaries Harold Goodwin, Hank Mann, and stuntman Harvey Parry. Keaton's wife Eleanor also was seen in the series (notably as Juliet to Keaton's Romeo in a little-theater vignette). Despite the hardworking cast and crew, the series was unsuccessful and only 13 half-hour episodes were filmed. Producer Hittleman audaciously reissued these same episodes in 1952 as though they were entirely new, with the series now titled Life with Buster Keaton. Variety reporter Fred Hift reviewed it as a series premiere, noting that it was filmed without a studio audience: the "lack of studio laughter weakened the climax of several of its acts." The producers fashioned a theatrical, hourlong feature film from the series, intended for the European market: The Misadventures of Buster Keaton was released on April 29, 1953 by British Lion, and it began playing on American television in September 1953. "Roughly reproduced slapstick museum piece, it's most likely to amuse those too young to remember the real thing," reported Josh Billings in London's Kinematograph Weekly. American television syndicators agreed, and marketed Life with Buster Keaton as a children's show. It continued to play for years afterward on small, low-budget stations.

Keaton's periodic television appearances during the 1950s and 1960s helped to revive interest in his silent films. He appeared in the early television series Faye Emerson's Wonderful Town. Whenever a TV show wanted to simulate silent-movie comedy, Keaton answered the call and guested in such successful series as The Ken Murray Show, You Asked for It, and The Garry Moore Show, and The Ed Sullivan Show. Well into his fifties, Keaton successfully recreated his old routines, including one stunt in which he propped one foot onto a table, then swung the second foot up next to it and held the awkward position in midair for a moment before crashing to the stage floor. Garry Moore recalled, "I asked (Keaton) how he did all those falls, and he said, 'I'll show you.' He opened his jacket and he was all bruised. So that's how he did it—it hurt—but you had to care enough not to care."

Silent films revived
In 1954, Keaton and Eleanor met movie-theater manager Raymond Rohauer, with whom they developed a business partnership to re-release his films. Actor James Mason had bought the Keatons' house and found numerous cans of films, among which was Keaton's long-lost classic The Boat. Keaton had prints of the features Three Ages, Sherlock Jr., Steamboat Bill, Jr., and College (missing one reel), and the shorts "The Boat" and "My Wife's Relations". Rohauer instructed Keaton to approach Mason for the films, but Mason decided to donate them to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Rohauer then formed a new legal entity, Buster Keaton Productions, which gave Rohauer legal access to the old films at the Academy.

From 1950 through 1964, Keaton made around 70 guest appearances on television variety shows, including those of Ed Sullivan and Garry Moore. Keaton also found steady work as an actor in TV commercials for Colgate, Alka-Seltzer, U.S. Steel, 7-Up, RCA Victor, Phillips 66, Milky Way, Ford Motors, Minute Rub, and Budweiser, among others. In a series of silent television commercials for Simon Pure Beer made in 1962 by Jim Mohr in Buffalo, New York, Keaton revisited some of the gags from his silent film days.

On April 3, 1957, Keaton was surprised by Ralph Edwards for the weekly NBC program This Is Your Life. The program also promoted the release of the biographical film The Buster Keaton Story with Donald O'Connor. In December 1958, Keaton was a guest star in the episode "A Very Merry Christmas" of The Donna Reed Show on ABC. He returned to the program in 1965 in the episode "Now You See It, Now You Don't". In August 1960, Keaton played mute King Sextimus the Silent in the national touring company of the Broadway musical Once Upon A Mattress. In 1960, he returned to MGM for the final time, playing a lion tamer in a 1960 adaptation of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Much of the film was shot on location on the Sacramento River, which doubled for the Mississippi River setting of Twain's book. In 1961, he starred in The Twilight Zone episode "Once Upon a Time", which included both silent and sound sequences. He worked with comedian Ernie Kovacs on a television pilot tentatively titled "Medicine Man," shooting scenes for it on January 12, 1962—the day before Kovacs died in a car crash. "Medicine Man" was completed but not aired.

In 1961, Keaton appeared in promotional films for Maryvale, a housing development in the western part of Phoenix.

Meanwhile, Keaton's big-screen career continued. He had a cameo as Jimmy, appearing near the end of the film It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963). Jimmy assists Spencer Tracy's character, Captain C. G. Culpepper, by readying Culpepper's ultimately-unused boat for his abortive escape. (The restored version of that film, released in 2013, contains a scene where Jimmy and Culpeper talk on the telephone. Lost after the comedy epic's "roadshow" exhibition, the audio of that scene was discovered and combined with still pictures to recreate the scene.)

Keaton starred in five films for American International Pictures: Pajama Party (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo, How to Stuff a Wild Bikini, and Sergeant Deadhead (all 1965), and War Italian Style (1966, co-starring the Italian comedy team of Franco and Ciccio). Director William Asher recalled:

"I always loved Buster Keaton.... He would bring me bits and routines. He'd say, 'How about this?' and it would just be this wonderful, inventive stuff."

In 1965, Keaton starred in the short film The Railrodder for the National Film Board of Canada. He traveled from one end of Canada to the other on a motorized handcar, wearing his traditional pork pie hat and performing gags similar to those in films that he made 50 years before. The film is also notable for being his last silent screen performance. He played the central role in Samuel Beckett's Film (1965), directed by Alan Schneider.

In 1965 he appeared on the CBS television special A Salute to Stan Laurel, a tribute to the comedian and friend of Keaton who had died earlier that year.

Keaton's last commercial film appearance was in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), which was filmed in Spain in September–November 1965. He amazed the cast and crew by doing many of his own stunts, although the Thames Television documentary reported that his increasingly ill health did force the use of a stunt double for some scenes. His final appearance on film was in The Scribe, a 1966 safety film produced in Toronto by the Construction Safety Associations of Ontario: he died shortly after completing it.

Use of parody

Keaton started experimenting with parody during his vaudeville years, where most frequently his performances involved impressions and burlesques of other performers' acts. Most of these parodies targeted acts with which Keaton had shared the bill. When Keaton transposed his experience in vaudeville to film, in many works he parodied melodramas. Other favorite targets were cinematic plots, structures and devices.

One of his most biting parodies is The Frozen North (1922), a satirical take on William S. Hart's Western melodramas, like Hell's Hinges (1916) and The Narrow Trail (1917). Keaton parodied the tired formula of the melodramatic transformation from bad guy to good guy, which Hart's characters went through, known as "the good badman". He wears a small version of Hart's campaign hat from the Spanish–American War and a six-shooter on each thigh, and during the scene in which he shoots the neighbor and her husband, he reacts with thick glycerin tears, a trademark of Hart's. Audiences of the 1920s recognized the parody and thought the film hysterically funny. However, Hart himself was not amused by Keaton's antics, particularly the crying scene, and did not speak to Keaton for two years after he had seen the film. The film's opening intertitles give it its mock-serious tone, and are taken from "The Shooting of Dan McGrew" by Robert W. Service.

In The Playhouse (1921), he parodied his contemporary Thomas H. Ince, Hart's producer, who indulged in over-crediting himself in his film productions. The short also featured the impression of a performing monkey which was likely derived from a co-biller's act (called Peter the Great). Three Ages (1923), his first feature-length film, is a parody of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance (1916), from which it replicates the three inter-cut shorts structure. Three Ages also featured parodies of Bible stories, like those of Samson and Daniel. Keaton directed the film, along with Edward F. Cline. By this time, Keaton had further developed his distinct signature style that consisted of lucidity and precision along with acrobatics of ballistic precision and kineticism. Critic and film historian Imogen Sara Smith stated about Keaton's style:

"the coolness and subtlety of his style [is] very cinematic in terms of recognising that the camera can pick up very, very small effects"

Body language
Film critic David Thomson later described Keaton's style of comedy: "Buster plainly is a man inclined towards a belief in nothing but mathematics and absurdity ... like a number that has always been searching for the right equation. Look at his face—as beautiful but as inhuman as a butterfly—and you see that utter failure to identify sentiment." Gilberto Perez commented on "Keaton's genius as an actor to keep a face so nearly deadpan and yet render it, by subtle inflections, so vividly expressive of inner life. His large, deep eyes are the most eloquent feature; with merely a stare, he can convey a wide range of emotions, from longing to mistrust, from puzzlement to sorrow." Critic Anthony Lane also noted Keaton's body language:

"The traditional Buster stance requires that he remain upstanding, full of backbone, looking ahead... [in The General] he clambers onto the roof of his locomotive and leans gently forward to scan the terrain, with the breeze in his hair and adventure zipping toward him around the next bend. It is the angle that you remember: the figure perfectly straight but tilted forward, like the Spirit of Ecstasy on the hood of a Rolls-Royce... [in The Three Ages], he drives a low-grade automobile over a bump in the road, and the car just crumbles beneath him. Rerun it on video, and you can see Buster riding the collapse like a surfer, hanging onto the steering wheel, coming beautifully to rest as the wave of wreckage breaks."

Film historian Jeffrey Vance wrote:

"Buster Keaton's comedy endures not just because he had a face that belongs on Mount Rushmore, at once hauntingly immovable and classically American, but because that face was attached to one of the most gifted actors and directors who ever graced the screen. Evolved from the knockabout upbringing of the vaudeville stage, Keaton's comedy is a whirlwind of hilarious, technically precise, adroitly executed, and surprising gags, very often set against a backdrop of visually stunning set pieces and locations—all this masked behind his unflinching, stoic veneer."

Pork-pie hats

Keaton designed and modified his own pork pie hats during his career. In 1964, he told an interviewer that in making "this particular pork pie", he "started with a good Stetson and cut it down", stiffening the brim with sugar water. The hats were often destroyed during Keaton's wild film antics; some were given away as gifts and some were snatched by souvenir hunters. Keaton said he was lucky if he used only six hats in making a film. He estimated that he and his wife Eleanor made thousands of hats during his career. Keaton observed that during his silent period, such a hat cost him around two dollars (~$27–33 in 2022 dollars); at the time of his interview, he said, they cost almost $13 (~$116 in 2022 dollars).

Personal life
On May 31, 1921, Keaton married Natalie Talmadge, his leading lady in Our Hospitality, and the sister of actresses Norma Talmadge (married to his business partner Joseph M. Schenck at the time) and Constance Talmadge, at Norma's home in Bayside, Queens. They had two sons: Joseph, called James (June 2, 1922 – February 14, 2007), and Robert (February 3, 1924 – July 19, 2009).

After Robert's birth, the marriage began to suffer. Talmadge decided not to have any more children, banishing Keaton to a separate bedroom; he dated actresses Dorothy Sebastian and Kathleen Key during this period. Natalie's extravagance was another factor, as she spent up to a third of her husband's earnings.

It was clear that Mr. Keaton and Mrs. Keaton had different ideas and lifestyles. Keaton had designed and built a modest but comfortable, cottage-like home as a surprise wedding gift for his bride. When she saw the little house, she flew into a rage: she thought the house was much too small, with no place for servants. Realizing that his bride wanted a palace, he sold the cottage to MGM executive Eddie Mannix at cost, and commissioned Gene Verge Sr. in 1926 to build a 10000 sqft estate in Beverly Hills for $300,000. Neighbors included Tom Mix and Rudolph Valentino. Among famous subsequent residents were renter Marlene Dietrich and, later, Cary Grant with his wife, heiress Barbara Hutton. James Mason and his wife Pamela purchased the home in 1948.

After attempts at reconciliation, Natalie divorced Buster in 1932, and changed the boys' surname to "Talmadge". On July 1, 1942, the 18-year-old Robert and the 20-year-old Joseph made the name change permanent after their mother won a court petition.

With the failure of his marriage and the loss of his independence as a filmmaker, Keaton descended into alcoholism. He was briefly institutionalized, according to the Turner Classic Movies documentary So Funny It Hurt. He escaped a straitjacket with tricks learned from Harry Houdini. In 1933, he married his nurse Mae Scriven during an alcoholic binge, about which he afterwards claimed to remember nothing. Scriven claimed that she did not know Keaton's real first name until after the marriage. She filed for divorce in 1935 after finding him with Leah Clampitt Sewell, the wife of millionaire Barton Sewell, in a hotel in Santa Barbara. They divorced in 1936 at great financial cost to Keaton. After undergoing aversion therapy, he stopped drinking for five years.

On May 29, 1940, Keaton married Eleanor Norris, who was 23 years his junior. She has been credited with salvaging his life and career. The marriage lasted until his death. Between 1947 and 1954, the couple appeared regularly in the Cirque Medrano in Paris as a double act. She came to know his routines so well that she often participated in them in television revivals.

Death
Keaton died of lung cancer on February 1, 1966, aged 70, in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles. Despite being diagnosed with cancer in January 1966, he was never told he was terminally ill. Keaton thought that he was recovering from a severe case of bronchitis. Confined to a hospital during his final days, Keaton was restless and paced the room endlessly, desiring to return home. In a British television documentary about his career, his widow Eleanor told producers from Thames Television that Keaton was up out of bed and moving around, and even played cards with friends who came to visit the day before he died. He was buried at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery in Hollywood Hills, California.

Influence and legacy

Keaton was presented with a 1959 Academy Honorary Award at the 32nd Academy Awards, held in April 1960. Keaton has two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame: 6619 Hollywood Boulevard (for motion pictures); and 6225 Hollywood Boulevard (for television).

Six of his films have been included in the National Film Registry, making him one of the most honored filmmakers on that list: One Week (1920), Cops (1922), Sherlock Jr. (1924), The General (1926), Steamboat Bill, Jr., and The Cameraman (both 1928)

A 1957 film biography, The Buster Keaton Story, starring Donald O'Connor as Keaton was released. The screenplay, by Sidney Sheldon, who also directed the film, was loosely based on Keaton's life but contained many factual errors and merged his three wives into one character. A 1987 documentary, Buster Keaton: A Hard Act to Follow, directed by Kevin Brownlow and David Gill, won two Emmy Awards.

The International Buster Keaton Society was founded on October 4, 1992: Keaton's birthday. Dedicated to bringing greater public attention to Keaton's life and work, the membership includes many individuals from the television and film industry: actors, producers, authors, artists, graphic novelists, musicians, and designers, as well as those who simply admire the magic of Buster Keaton. The Society's nickname, the "Damfinos", draws its name from a boat in Keaton's 1921 comedy, The Boat.

In his essay Film-arte, film-antiartístico, artist Salvador Dalí declared the works of Keaton to be prime examples of "anti-artistic" filmmaking, calling them "pure poetry". In 1925, Dalí produced a collage titled The Marriage of Buster Keaton featuring an image of the comedian in a seated pose, staring straight ahead with his trademark boater hat resting in his lap.

Film critic Roger Ebert stated, "The greatest of the silent clowns is Buster Keaton, not only because of what he did, but because of how he did it. Harold Lloyd made us laugh as much, Charlie Chaplin moved us more deeply, but no one had more courage than Buster." In his presentation for The General, filmmaker Orson Welles hailed Buster Keaton as "the greatest of all the clowns in the history of the cinema... a supreme artist, and I think one of the most beautiful people who was ever photographed". Welles said Keaton was "beyond all praise... a very great artist, and one of the most beautiful men I ever saw on the screen. He was also a great director. In the last analysis, no one came near him."

Filmmaker Mel Brooks has credited Keaton as a major influence, saying: "I owe (Buster) a lot on two levels: One for being such a great teacher for me as a filmmaker myself, and the other just as a human being watching this gifted person doing these amazing things. He made me believe in make-believe." He also admitted to borrowing the idea of the changing room scene in The Cameraman for his own film Silent Movie. Keaton's Sherlock Jr., in which he walks into the movie he is projecting, was an influence Woody Allen's The Purple Rose of Cairo, in which a character walks out of a movie and into real life. George Lucas was influenced by Keaton for the character of Jar Jar Binks in Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace. Most notably he borrowed from The General, The Navigator, and Seven Chances.

In 1994, caricaturist Al Hirschfeld penned a series of silent film stars for the United States Post Office, including Rudolph Valentino and Keaton. Hirschfeld said that modern film stars were more difficult to depict, that silent film comedians such as Laurel and Hardy and Keaton "looked like their caricatures".

In 1996, Entertainment Weekly recognized Keaton as the seventh-greatest film director, writing that "More than Chaplin, Keaton understood movies: He knew they consisted of a four-sided frame in which resided a malleable reality off which his persona could bounce. A vaudeville child star, Keaton grew up to be a tinkerer, an athlete, a visual mathematician; his films offer belly laughs of mind-boggling physical invention and a spacey determination that nears philosophical grandeur."

Actor and stunt performer Johnny Knoxville cites Keaton as an inspiration when coming up with ideas for Jackass projects. He re-enacted a famous Keaton stunt for the finale of Jackass Number Two. Comedian Richard Lewis stated that Keaton was his prime inspiration, and spoke of having a close friendship with Keaton's widow Eleanor. Lewis was particularly moved by the fact that Eleanor said his eyes looked like Keaton's.

In 2012, Kino Lorber released The Ultimate Buster Keaton Collection, a 14-disc Blu-ray box set of Keaton's work, including 11 of his feature films. In 2016, Tony Hale portrayed Keaton in an episode of Drunk History focusing on the silent comedian's supposed rivalry with Charlie Chaplin, who was played by musician Billie Joe Armstrong. On June 16, 2018, the International Buster Keaton Society laid a four-foot plaque in honor of both Keaton and Charles Chaplin on the corner of the shared block (1021 Lillian Ave) where each had made many of their silent comedies in Hollywood. In honor of the event, the City of Los Angeles declared the date "Buster Keaton Day."

In 2018, filmmaker Peter Bogdanovich released The Great Buster: A Celebration, a documentary about Keaton's life, career, and legacy. In 2022, two works on Keaton appeared within a month of each other. Critic Dana Stevens published a cultural history of Keaton's life and work, Camera Man: Buster Keaton, the Dawn of Cinema, and the Invention of the Twentieth Century. It was followed a month later by James Curtis' biography Buster Keaton: A Filmmaker's Life. In 2023, Keaton's life and work was depicted in the graphic novel biography Buster: A Life in Pictures, written by Ryan Barnett and illustrated by Matthew Tavares.

Filmography
Directed features:
 * Three Ages (1923)
 * Our Hospitality (1923)
 * Sherlock Jr. (1924)
 * The Navigator (1924)
 * Seven Chances (1925)
 * Go West (1925)
 * Battling Butler (1926)
 * The General (1926)
 * College (1927)
 * Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928)
 * The Cameraman (1928)
 * Spite Marriage (1929)

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: Buster Keaton


text:
Talk:Electroweak interaction

Unification with Strong Interaction
Should someone point out that this force has been shown to be identical to the strong force at high enough energy states? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 167.206.78.2 (talk) 6 March 2002

 * Duh?!!! Thaz something new to me.. can you state some external websites for reference plz? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 62.211.62.220 (talk) 6 March 2002

Identical isn't perhaps the best description. It is believed to unify with strong force to form the hyperweak force at high enough energies in the same way as the elctromagnetic and weak forces unify to make the electroweak force itself. Anyway, this is all somewhat speculative as I don't think there is any fully developed theory of how this works (at least that is successful in producing other aspects of the SM). Additionally, I belive supersymmetry is required to make this unification take place, and that in itself is still a hotly debated area with little or no experimental backup. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Jcobb (talk • contribs) 22:58, 20 February 2004

 * The unification with the strong force is the subject of grand unified theories. Maybe just a "see also"?  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.147.149.53 (talk) 19:01, 12 September 2004

 * Here's one: see electronuclear force. — Herbee 13:06, 29 December 2005 (UTC)

Name of article
Shouldn't this article be entitled 'Electroweak theory' (or something along those lines) instead of 'Electroweak force '? The other fundamental forces have separate pages for the forces and the theories describing those forces. MP  (talk) 10:27, 28 December 2005 (UTC)

Experimental evidence
If I am not mistaken, there should be discussion of experimental evidence. The article posits the union of the electromagnetic interaction with the weak interaction at energies of 100 GeV. Energies of 200 GeV are not uncommon in accelerators these days. The Tevatron at Fermilab reaches 2 TeV, and the Large Hadron Collider will reach 14 TeV (combined energy). Hu 05:39, 24 March 2006 (UTC)

 * I second that motion. On the QGP page, it says "The theory of weak interactions has been tested and found correct to a few parts in a thousand". Examples, anyone? Wikipedia brown 06:35, 19 July 2006 (UTC)

To-do List?
Would someone be willing to make up at least a tenative to-do list for this article? Its kind of a shame that Katie Holmes had a featured article on the main page, but this article, based on Nobel prize winning research is still a stub. I'd do it, but I'm afraid I'm woefully unqualified, being only an undergraduate, with limited experience in this specific segement of high-energy physics. -Davepetr 06:56, 9 April 2006 (UTC)
 * At least, someone could write something about Quantum flavordynamics (QFD). I think that Electroweak Theory = QED + QFD. I do not know what is the current status of QFD... Urvabara 10:03, 2 November 2007 (UTC)
 * As a layman I'd like to know how the forces can be unified when different carriers are employed for EM and WNF. --Belg4mit (talk) 04:12, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Lagrangian diagram
As the first thing to do, may I suggest someone correct the Lagrangian diagram? See Quantum Field Theory: A Modern Introduction (1993), ISBN 0-19-507652-4 page 336 by Michio Kaku. I'd make the changes myself, but I'm not sure how.--Michael C. Price talk 12:21, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
 * The lambda in the Higgs field self-interaction has the wrong sign (and possibly the mu squared as well, although that might depend on convention; these two terms having opposite sign is clearer IMO).
 * The gauge field term coefficient in B in the left-handed field should be 1/2 the coefficient in the right handed field. They are currently shown as identical.
 * Would be nice if the two gauge fields associated the Higgs differential operator were made explicit, as they have been made for the electron and neutrino.

Is there a reason we have this as an image? It's not as clear as it would be as LaTeX. --Taejo|대조 12:16, 16 June 2007 (UTC)

 * I see some much needed updates are being done. Suggestion: that we have a before and after symmetry-breaking version.  --Michael C. Price talk 20:09, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

 * Agreed on the need for a lot of work and on the usefulness of a post EWSB Lagrangian, including the CKM matrix. This was a first pass at getting something that was correct and aligned with standard notation.  jay 22:57, 10 July 2007 (UTC)

 * I made several corrections to the lagrangean before realizing I wasn't logged in. Sorry about that. There are still corrections to be made. Dauto (talk) 17:59, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

What a bunch of formulae (:  each of those would deserve an article of its own  --82.130.14.173 (talk) 21:55, 4 March 2008 (UTC)

I would suggest someone add the definitions of all the variables involved in the lagrangian, even to the point of saying that the "a" sub/superscripts on the W run over 1,2,3. This would make it more parseable to nonphysicists. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 134.107.13.185 (talk) 14:17, 11 March 2010 (UTC)

 * Agreed. I'd particularly like to see the substitutions that were necessary to get from the unbroken- to the broken-symmetry Lagrangian.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.246.132.177 (talk • contribs) 19:25, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

 * I think that "h.c." means the Hermitian conjugate of the preceding terms (the anti-matter analogue). But I still have not figured out what "g" and "fabc " mean. JRSpriggs (talk) 10:16, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
 * "g" is the electroweak coupling constant.
 * "fabc " are the structure constants of the Lie algebra. (i.e. if ga is a basis of the lie algebra (su(2)x u(1) in this case), then [ga,gb]=i fabcgc).

 * (Also, wow this article is an unreadable mess)TR 10:43, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

In the before Lagrangian, in this term:
 * $$\mathcal{L}_f =  \overline{Q}_i iD\!\!\!\!/\; Q_i+ \overline{u}_i^c iD\!\!\!\!/\; u^c_i+ \overline{d}_i^c iD\!\!\!\!/\; d^c_i+ \overline{L}_i iD\!\!\!\!/\; L_i+ \overline{e}^c_i iD\!\!\!\!/\; e^c_i $$

I take it that $$e_i \,$$ varies over the spinors for the electron, muon, and tauon as i=1,2,3. Right? Similarly, $$d_i \,$$ varies over the spinors for the down quark, strange quark, and bottom quark as i=1,2,3. Right? And, $$u_i \,$$ varies over the spinors for the up quark, charm quark, and top quark as i=1,2,3. Right? So what do $$L_i \,$$ and $$Q_i \,$$ mean? And what does the superscript c mean? JRSpriggs (talk) 21:01, 23 July 2012 (UTC)
 * Yes, the "i" index appears to enumerate the generation.
 * The lower case letters (u,d,e) indicate the right-handed fermions (each forms a singlet under the weak SU(2) symmetry). The uppercase letters (Q,L) indicated the left handed SU(2) doublets. I.e. Q=(uL,dL) L=(νL,eL).
 * As for the c superscript. This is normally used to indicate the charge conjugated field. However, I am puzzled why somebody would use it in the Lagrangian like that. (the sources I checked simply have the plain fields in that location.) It might have to do with specific conventions used by the author.
 * The c does indeed denote charge conjugation. It's a convention to write it like this so that it's clear that the fields appearing in the lagrangian are all left handed. That is, rather than using the right-handed singlet states, the charge conjugate fields of them are used. It's not hard to argue that it's mathematically (more) valid, but I think it's an unnecessary complication in the equation, and I will remove it in some other edits that I'm making. --Certain (talk) 00:37, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
 * BTW, if you are trying to figure out what the hell is going on in this Lagrangian, I recommend NOT using this article. Instead pick up a proper book on QFT. For example this Lagrangian is treated in depth in chapter 20.2 of Peskin&Schroeder, Introduction to Quantum Field Theory. It may be though for a lay reader, but at least they explain what their notation means, making it a lot easier to parse than this article.TR 22:04, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

OK---I did a little cleaning up to the lagrangian in the section before EWSB, but when I got to the last two terms I realized this is just a complete mess. It seems odd to include the Higgs VEV explicitly in the higgs term in the section before EWSB. (Maybe even silly to include the higgs term at all, no?). The Yukawa term should also probably be reformatted to just have the coupling of the left- and right-handed fields by the masses, without mention of the Higgs field. This term can then be redescrbed in the post EWSB section as a Yukawa interaction with the higgs field. Overall: this article is a mess. --Certain (talk) 00:47, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
 * I think that "before EWSB" here is supposed to mean "before expanding the Higgs field around its ground state", i.e. the Lagrangian in its explicit symmetric form. Not, the Lagrangian of the SM before anybody included terms that lead to EWSB.TR 06:35, 16 August 2012 (UTC)
 * Then it's definitely incorrect to include the vev in that section, because then the field is already being expanded around the vev. It might just be best to scrap almost all of this page and put a link to the higgs mechanism page. (Though I haven't thoroughly read that page, it does appear more correct.) This won't show the specific application of the mechanism to the SM a la Weinberg & Salam, but it will be more valuable as a properly formatted reference.--88.64.10.112 (talk) 22:59, 19 August 2012 (UTC)
 * The only place where the vev appears in that section is in the potential of the Higgs field, where it is a parameter. That is certainly correct. In fact, despite being badly written as an encyclopedic entry, the treatment given here is mostly consistent with the treatment of this very subject in Peskin & Schroeder.TR 07:33, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Unified theory of Eletroweak Interactions
I guess I should also point out that, as it stands, the article implies that the Electroweak theory (EWT) is a theory of the unified electromagnetic and weak interactions. That's an extremely common misconception. Correct would be to call it the unified theory of the electromagnetic and weak interactions. What's the difference? It is an unified theory in the sense that describes both interactions in one single self-consistent framework, but the theory still requires two different coupling constants and as such does not constitute a unification of interactions in the same sense that the term is used when talking about grand unified theory (GUT). Unlike EWT, GUT models do indeed unify three interaction (electromagnetic, weak, and strong) as three different aspects of a single interaction. only one coupling constant is needed. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Dauto (talk • contribs) 18:30, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

Hot Universe?
How is a hot Universe different than hot matter in a universe? Does the entire universe need to be hot in order to unify the forces or is it enough for only the part of the universe inside a box to be hot in order to unify the forces inside a box? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.126.215.43 (talk) 18:57, 9 July 2009 (UTC)

 * The term "hot universe" refers to a situation where the entire universe contains particles that are "hot" (in this case, posessing energies above the electroweak unification scale). You are correct in noting that any finite region satisfying this condition would also have unification-type behavior occur within that region. That's more or less how particle accelerators attempt to study it (you can consider the colliding particles as producing a very small region in which this condition is satisfied, though there are many other ways of looking at it that are also valid). The whole-universe case is interesting because we're reasonably sure our universe went through a period where it was this hot, which may have left some detectable signature or imprint that tells us about the exact nature of the unification. --Christopher Thomas (talk) 05:14, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

And where are Maxwell's Equations?
if they can't pull Maxwell's equations out of their particle theory then they have not unified anything at all. It is a gross exaggeration to claim they have unified electro with weak. And without the hypothetical big bang the conditions for their theory don't even exist in nature. Also, what they are really playing with is QED which is just a shell game as Feynman admitted. 173.169.90.98 (talk) 13:37, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
 * But you can pull ME out of EW theory. --Michael C. Price talk 16:36, 20 April 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you have a question about the article or are you simply ranting? FYI Maxwell equations come out of the Lagrangian as part of the equations of motion. Dauto (talk) 16:52, 28 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Maxwell's equations are that 1/4 A^uv A_uv term in the broken Lagrangian. "A" is made up of various combinations of derivatives of the E and B fields. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 130.246.132.177 (talk • contribs) 19:25, 9 July 2012 (UTC)

Redirect
Would anyone like to create a redirect from electroweak unification? 70.247.169.197 (talk) 01:14, 11 August 2010 (UTC)

More on history
The article needs more on the history of this theory, e.g., what was the first paper written on it and when did it appear? What precursor work was done? What persons/groups were "also-rans"? The theory is part of the Standard Model now, but were/are there any objections to it? Etc. --96.233.94.233 (talk) 02:04, 27 April 2011 (UTC)

Remove reference to W0
There is a reference to a W0 boson in this article, which is should be a Z0 boson, surely. Just checking in here before I fix it. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 202.36.29.1 (talk) 02:27, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

 * Do not "fix" it; it is OK as is. If you read the article, you will see that the W0 mixes with the B0 to produce the Z0 and the photon. JRSpriggs (talk) 07:55, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Does it add same teams twice?
in the section After electroweak symmetry breaking, the quadratic terms L(K) was including mass terms, which are repeated in the terms L(HV) and L(Y). But they are added up in the first formula. Am I right?--Haojian (talk) 03:34, 18 February 2014 (UTC)

L_K contains only terms with two fields, while L_HV and L_Y contain only terms with more than two, so there can't be repeated terms.-Dilaton (talk) 18:55, 19 February 2014 (UTC)

 * Could I say that, the mass terms in L_K are interactions between particle fields and Higgs field, in which the Higgs field was regarded as constant and then was packed into the mass values, so contain only two particle fields; on the other hand, L_HV and L_Y contain SAME terms in which the Higgs field was regarded as one of fields, so these teams contain more than two fields?--Haojian (talk) 02:39, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

 * This is after symmetry breaking, so the masses were established via the Higgs mechanism, and there is now the "seperate" Higgs field.-Dilaton (talk) 06:12, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

 * The fields can be separate, but the teams are still identity?--Haojian (talk) 07:55, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

codata 2014
CODATA 2014 gives sw²=0.2223(21) thus sw=0.471487
 * $$M_Z=\frac{M_W}{\cos\theta_W}$$ gives $$c_w=\cos\theta_W=M_W/M_Z=\sqrt{1-s_w^2}=0.88187$$

the 2nd diagram gives
 * $$e=\sin\theta_W\cdot g$$ giving $$g=e / \sin\theta_W = 3.398\cdot 10^{-19} $$C
 * $$e=\cos\theta_W\cdot g'$$ giving $$g'=e / \cos\theta_W = 1.81679\cdot 10^{-19} $$C

all correct? Ra-raisch (talk) 21:44, 3 August 2017 (UTC)

 * By and large, yes. Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 13:25, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

good, I think it would be an enrichment, I'm not sure which page would be the appropriate place. Besides these quantities and formulas could be posted alongside:
 * $$\alpha_s = \alpha / c_w^2 = (g'/q_P)^2 = 0.009383 $$
 * $$\alpha_w = \alpha / s_w^2 = (g/q_P)^2 = 0.03283 $$

and may-be these too:
 * $$g_s = \sqrt{4 \pi \alpha_s} = 0.34338 $$
 * $$g_w = \sqrt{4 \pi \alpha_w} = 0.6423 $$

only I am not sure how to name all of these quantities. (gauge parameters: gs and gw, coupling strength = charge: g and g', coupling constants αw and αs). Anybody feel free to fulfill the job. Ra-raisch (talk) 15:47, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

 * I am not inclined to do this myself. I feel that anyone looking at it would go back and forth to Planck charge half a dozen times, and tweak the obvious formulas wondering why, oh why, wasn't the standard qP' used. Nobody I've ever met looks at the hypercharge coupling g' as anything but a tanθ multiple of g, and, really, g as anything but e/sinθ .  So once one  is at peace, truly at peace, with the $$e \approx 0.30282212088~q_\text{P}'$$, suitably updated, of course, of that article, I don't see the point of  idle lists of symbols.  Perhaps one could insert a footnote with just that value, or else a link to the definitions.  In any and all applications,  final  answers are related to the electric charge, (and, frankly, the dimensionless fine structure constant α), multiplied by suitable powers of ħ  and c.  I would doubt that this is a proper venue for electric charge metrology... Perhaps other editor has bright ideas on this.... Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 16:39, 4 August 2017 (UTC)

citation of the main text: Above the unification energy, on the order of 246 GeV, ...
We most times think that the grand unified theory it's only about extremely high energy, but it can work as well if the higgs field at a phase transition causes the threshold of quantum noise of the void to lower even more. Theoretically that will lead to big bang. We shouldn't add that here, but electromagnetism is well attested, so filtering our thoughts through what works well, might help.

Meaning of "before" and "after"
In the sections titled Before (and after) Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking, I think it would be good to clarify whether (a) Before and After refer to the sequence in which the equations are derived, or (b) Before and After refer to some event in cosmology when the forces diverged, or (c) both (a) and (b) Spope3 (talk) 04:07, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

 * Well, I suspect it is left open-ended to accommodate all points of view: Strictly speaking, "before" would be for a vanishing order parameter v, and "after" for a non-vanishing one. However, traditionally,  SSB is introduced pedagogically as some sort of an option to expand fields around the proper vanishing v.e.v. for non-vanishing v, as though SSB were a matter of variable choice!?! Still, hopefully, nobody is confused when "before" refers to the field operators and "after" to excitations around the physical vacuum. Cosmological transitions might be best described by situations above or below SSB energy scales. In any case, if there were a sound, pithy, concise, qualification or footnote you'd propose, it could be helpful; provided no torrent of ambiguous verbiage were introduced that would raise more questions than it could answer. Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 18:36, 6 April 2018 (UTC)

 * I think it's clear that "before" and "after" refer to the derivation. Whether they also refer, or should refer, to the cosmological sequence is not clear to me.  The article on "Electroweak Epoch" refers the the (merged) electroweak force, so that might mean before SSB, but also refers to W and Z bosons being created during this epoch (not the pre-SSB massless bosons).  I don't have the technical understanding to know what's up with that, but it seems to suggest the weak mixing angle was already a law of nature and did not only come into existence when the weak force froze out.
 * So, I'm not adding any verbiage to the main text here.
 * Spope3 (talk) 01:29, 7 April 2018 (UTC)

Accessibility
I'm writing this here to discuss some of my thoughts regarding a recent edit I made. While it is not my intention to duplicate content across pages, or to "dumb down" this page, I do believe strongly that each article should stand by itself and be accessible to as wide of an audience as possible - many people who are not physicists will be curious to understand the fundamental ways in which our universe works. This page, particularly as it was before my recent edit, relies heavily on jargon and opaque-seeming equations that can scare away many readers - including readers who may have a strong amount of curiousity and ambient knowledge about particle physics, but have never actually taken a physics class. Per WP:MTAU, such a reader should be able to read the article and come away having learned something meaningful, and in the form the article has been, it very much fails in that regard. I would also like to note that while some of the information in my edit was informed by the Mathematical formulation of the Standard Model page, most of it either was simply a better presentation of the information already present here, or explained in a relatively straightforward, accessible way that many pages here on Wikipedia don't present the information in, including that page.

Considering that this page describes a fundamental aspect of how our universe works, a reader should be able to read this article having never heard "symmetry" used in a physics context, having no idea what spontaneous symmetry breaking actually means, and with little prior knowledge of Lie algebra, or group theory in general, among many other concepts physicists take for granted, because many readers will come here and otherwise be very confused, meaning that we will have failed to accomplish the very task Wikipedia exists to fulfill. - Ramzuiv (talk) 18:07, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

 * Your basic intent appears salutary, but a cornerstone of WP is that it is not a tutorial: Wikiuniversity does that. So, for instance, referring explanations to articles on symmetry or symmetry breaking should be enough to steer the interested novice to more elaborate features of QFT. Aspiring to an illusory completeness in one place overburdens articles and makes them unreadable to the experts seeking a crib-sheet summary as this article. There is a standard model article doing the nontechnical stuff, and there is nothing wrong improving this one with useful additions and footnotes, even, beyond wikilinks. However, I feel sticking in "unfunded mandate" comments instead for boldly profering improvements may be self defeating. It might get experts to shrug off, and nonexperts to rush to stick in crank material, which happens all too often. For instance, the gauge fileds' adjoint to adjoint current complaint, relying on how fermion doublet bilinears yield an adjoint current is thoroughly unwarranted: any group theory book or SM text explains it, and WP simply cannot (and should not!) explain it. That's what WU tutorials are for.  Short articles like this may well be the wrong venue. In any case, good luck with your efforts... Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 18:51, 25 September 2019 (UTC)

 * I'll update this later when I have more developed thoughts. In the mean time, would you mind linking me to the page that lays down the cornerstone that WP is not a tutorial? I don't think I have been familiarized with that perspective yet, and a (very) quick search didn't pull anything up. -Ramzuiv (talk) 20:04, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Closest might be this but you really should get to the physics project pages and especially the wikiversity ones. They are the venues you are envisioning.  Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 22:34, 25 September 2019 (UTC)
 * Ah, I see, I think you misunderstand my intention in my edits. Indeed, it is not my intention to make a textbook out of Wikipedia, nor to make this page an introduction to quantum physics, particle physics, nor the standard model. I will readily admit that there are criticisms about the specifics details of my edits that I would happily concede as perhaps being overly detailed, or placing information in the wrong spot. It is a fact that in general, this domain of physics is explained here almost purely in terms that are too opaque for an average reader to understand - not just this page, but many of the pages linked to in this page, and the pages those pages link to. Even a reader willing to "dive in" to the rabbit hole of links is at high risk of coming out scratching their head.

 * It is almost certainly true that for parts of my recent edits on this page, I placed an explanation here that really should be explained on a different page, and that other page is itself poorly written, and lacks a good explanation. It would be a valid criticism to say that the explanation should be moved to the relevant page, and this thought even did cross my mind as I was labouring to clarify what is presented here. However, that does not change the fact that Wikipedia policy (including the page you linked to) mandates that all pages (or almost all), including this one, should be presented in terms as accessible to an uninformed reader as possible, and should explain or avoid jargon and technical language whenever possible. This is not simply my personal endeavor, but the very cornerstone of what makes Wikipedia such a valuable resource for so many.

 * I am happy to consider and discuss specific details about my improvements to this page, and how to further guide it towards being an A-class encyclopedia-worthy article (which my edits are two steps towards and one step away from), but to criticize the general spirit of my work here either reflects a misunderstanding of my motivations here, or a disregard for the actual principles of Wikipedia's mission - Ramzuiv (talk) 21:09, 26 September 2019 (UTC)

I am going to be frank with you, at the expense of tact: the September 8 version of the article is substantially superior to the present one, in the eyes of anyone who has taken a basic particle physics or QFT course. It has the basic information, correctly, and concisely summarized. The present version is roiling with subtle misconceptions and diversions that would confuse all students and teachers of such courses; I cannot tell what the nonexpert will gain from "complex-valued" etc... The organization of the Weinberg rotation is distincly pathological: look at the figure! I fully approve of your salutary intent to make it accessible, but at present it reads like the kind of discursive, distracting blather that popular science magazines are notoriously unhelpful with cartooning. I personally am not ready to fuss chapter and verse of every parenthesis, but I suspect all your explanatory remarks would easily fit in a long footnote, or, better, as a proposal on this Talk page, to have somebody else discuss and help with. I repeat, popularizations of the standard model in the inexpert press have done untold damage to the public appreciation, despite their good intentions, and are worse than attempts of accessibility to math articles, which most people avoid, wisely. "First, do no damage", as Hippocrates opined... But this is an open beach to write on its sands, I guess... Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 13:56, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

 * I can acknowledge that there are imperfections. I am not an expert in this field, and I'm trying my best to explain it based off of... what was on this page previously and other pages here on this Wiki (that is, any misconceptions are thanks to the vagueness of the previous version of the page). I agree that it makes little sense to include that the fields are complex valued. My question, why not edit the page, to maintain the clearer explanations where they are, and change what really fell flat?

 * I'm sure you can imagine, all my effort in this page stems from my curiousity about this subject. This is not a subject that belongs only to physicists. This website does not exist to serve physicists at everyone else's expense. Yes, I would prefer an accessible explanation from someone who actually knows about this subject, but in lack of that previous effort, I have done my part to move things forward, and if someone who actually is knowledgeable sees mistakes I have made, they should do their part to fix those inaccuracies where they exist while remembering what Wikipedia strives to be. -Ramzuiv (talk) 15:34, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

 * OK, I rearranged the furniture, hopefully consistent with your focus. I am afraid spontaneous symmetry breaking and its co9mbination with the Higgs mechanism is something not easily outlined with a few poetic sentences--it confuses even students, routinely. But at least it is segregated here to suggest it should not quite be obvious.... Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 16:42, 27 September 2019 (UTC)

 * Thanks, it looks good. - Ramzuiv (talk) 03:34, 28 September 2019 (UTC)

Typo in $${\cal L}_{HV}$$?
I am missing HWW and HZZ interactions from the formula as is stands. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.183.103.17 (talk) 21:50, 1 December 2022 (UTC)
 * I moved your comment to the end of the list, as per WP instructions. Indeed, such interactions are also present, but "contains" does not mean "contains only".  Cuzkatzimhut (talk) 22:35, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

title: Talk:Electroweak interaction


text:
Omaha (disambiguation)

Omaha is the largest city in Nebraska, United States.

Omaha may also refer to:

Places

 * Omaha Beach, the Allied code name for one of the June 6, 1944, Battle of Normandy landing sites
 * Ōmaha, New Zealand, north of Auckland

United States

 * Omaha, Alabama
 * Omaha, Arkansas
 * Omaha, Georgia
 * Omaha, Illinois
 * Omaha, Missouri
 * Omaha, Texas
 * Omaha, Virginia

Games and sports

 * Omaha (horse), winner of the US Triple Crown of Thoroughbred Racing in 1935
 * College World Series, the tournament that ends the NCAA Division I baseball season, held in Omaha and thus sometimes called "Omaha"
 * Omaha hold 'em, a poker variant
 * Omaha Mavericks, the athletic program of the University of Nebraska Omaha

Music

 * Omaha (album), 2008 album by Ulf Lundell
 * "Omaha", a 1973 song by Waylon Jennings from Honky Tonk Heroes
 * "Omaha", a 1994 song by Counting Crows from August and Everything After
 * "Omaha", a 1967 song by Moby Grape from Moby Grape
 * "Omaha", a song by Tapes 'n Tapes

Ships

 * USS Omaha (1869), a sloop which served in the last decades of the 19th century
 * USS Omaha (CL-4), the lead ship of the Omaha-class of light cruiser, served during World War II
 * USS Omaha (SSN-692), a Los Angeles-class submarine, served during the last years of the Cold War
 * USS Omaha (LCS-12), a Independence-class littoral combat ship, serving since 2018

Other uses

 * Omaha people, a Native American tribe that currently resides in the northeastern part of the US state of Nebraska
 * Omaha (software), Google's open-source project providing automated deployment of software updates

title: Omaha (disambiguation)


text:
Talk:Gene

Suggesting 2015 GA Review
Transcluded from Talk:Gene/Review

Definition of "gene" (again)

 * '' Continued from talk:Gene

There are two different definitions of "gene" in the text and this needs to be fixed. We're talking about the molecular gene and the definition used by knowledgeable scientists is that a gene is a DNA sequence that's transcribed to produce a functional RNA. That RNA could be mRNA or any one a of a number of noncoding RNAs. That's the definition described in the first paragraph and it's supported by several appropriate references.

In the second-last paragraph we are introduced to the idea that "The concept of gene continues to be refined as new phenomena are discovered" and some of those "new phenomena" are supposed to be regulatory sequences and exons and introns. But regulatory sequences have been known for almost 60 years and they are not considered to be a part of the gene as defined in the first paragraph. Introns have always been considered part of the molecular definition of a gene ever since they were discovered about 50 years ago.

Another so-called "new phenomenon" is functional noncoding RNA but that's not new and it doesn't change the definition of gene that's used in the first paragraph. Knowledgeable scientists have known about noncoding genes since the mid-1960s. The fact that some genes are made of RNA deserves to be mentioned in the first paragraph so I've inserted two sentences.

The so-called "new" definition described in the last paragraph is " a broad, modern working definition of a gene is any discrete locus of heritable, genomic sequence which affect an organism's traits by being expressed as a functional product or by regulation of gene expression." I don't agree with this definition. It is supported by two references written by people who thought that the old definition referred only to protein-coding genes. (One them is Elizabeth Pennisi - a very unreliable source.) They were wrong and we don't need to quote people who had a misconception about the real historical definition of a gene.

I propose that we delete the second-last paragraph of the lead. Genome42 (talk) 22:14, 22 February 2023 (UTC)

 * I'd be fine with deleting the second-last paragraph of the current lead, especially since there seems to be a section dedicated to different definitions. It's probably still worth noting in the lede section that there are alternative definitions of a 'gene' other than the one in the very first sentence.
 * It'd probably also be worth organising that Definitions section a bit more, since it's currently a bit of a list of quotes (e.g. moving the Functional definitions subsection over from Structure and function). I think it's also better to focus on the fundamental aspects of each definition rather than who exactly coined it in most cases outside of the History section. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 06:52, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
 * @Evolution and evolvability: I appreciate your effort to clarify the discussion over different definitions of "gene" but I really don't think your edits are helpful. You deleted a specific reference to Dawkins but I think that's vey important since "The Selfish Gene" is one of the most widely read books on the subject and it contributes significantly to confusion about the meaning of the word "gene," especially in the context of an article that's mainly about the molecular gene.

 * Breaking the section into subsections seems (IMHO) to make the discussion disjointed since two of the subsections ("Inheritance" and "Selection") both refer to the Mendelian gene and this article isn't about the Mendelian gene. That's covered under Genetics. In addition, your description of the Mendelian gene and its connection to selection is adequately covered under Gene-centered view of evolution and I think we should be linking to other articles when they cover a topic correctly.

 * Also, you added something about synthetic genes that isn't appropriate. Artificial DNA segments that some people refer to as genes are not relevant. The sentence on "de novo" genes is also more confusing than enlightening because in order to actually qualify as a "de novo" gene, the sequence has to meet the acceptable definition. The edit doesn't add anything to the discussion.

 * The problems are compounded by another discussion further down in the article under "Functional definitions." That discussion conflicts with the one we are editing and that's going to cause a problem later on. (Do we really need to waste time on rare overlapping genes when there's a very good article on the subject?)

 * Genome42 (talk) 18:16, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
 * I see what you're saying, though I think there are ways to note dawkins's influence on the popular understanding that flow a bit better. It may even work well to state the molecular definition first in that section (since it's the more common usage) then the second part can mention the continued contemporary use of a modern Mendelian definition in certain circumstances (e.g. forward genetics).
 * Wikipedia typically avoids phrasing around "This article focuses on..." and "More thorough discussions of this version of a gene can be found in...". It is probably better to state something more like "in a molecular biology context the definition most commonly used is XYZ. The reader can then see that the majority of the page is discussing molecular biology (except the mendelian inheritance section), then "in a genetics context (particularly forward genetics and gene-centred evolution), a mendelian definition is still sometimes used XYZ". That way a reader can see those contexts in the same way without the editorialised voice.
 * Are four examples of definitions needed as a list in the section? Perhaps it could work better to state the consensus definition before the minor variations that exist around it and to note what particular differences those examples exemplify.
 * I agree that the Functional definitions section needs to move up into this one and get integrated in. The whole Definitions section should probably end up 500-800 words. Overlapping genes probably deserves a sentence rather than a whole subsection. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 03:43, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
 * There's a lot of misinformation on the web and one of our goals should be to counter that by posting reliable information on Wikipedia. But that's not sufficient because in order to counter misinformation you also have to debunk it.
 * In this case, the myths that need correcting are that up until the genomics era scientists thought that protein-coding genes were the only kind of gene and they thought that all noncoding DNA was junk. You and I know that's not true but statements to that effect are very common in the scientific literature. We need to spend a bit of effort showing that the real scientific definition of a gene hasn't changed substantially in 50 years in spite of what one might have heard or read.
 * Whenever you do that, it will sound like editorializing to all those people who are being asked to re-evaluate their preconceived notions. I realize that the Wikipedia culture is usually opposed to making strong statements about what's true and what's not but that's something that we need to change because it's getting in the way of critical thinking.
 * We have another problem. There are a ton of articles about molecular biology and they often cover the same topics and they often conflict. Can you guess how many times the structure of DNA is discussed? We need to clean up this mess by concentrating on a few high quality articles that can be linked to. This is one of those articles. We shouldn't be afraid of linking to other high quality articles for more information, especially if the topic is too complicated to summarize.
 * Along those lines, there are separate articles on Gene structure, Structural gene, Gene product, Gene family, Gene redundancy, Regulator gene, Pseudogene, Gene desert, Non-coding RNA, and Conserved non-coding sequence. Many of these articles cover the same topics and they often don't agree. Many of them discuss genes but they don't use the same definition we use here. This is a problem.
 * The term "overlapping genes" is a problem. In the case of well-studied prokaryotic examples what we're actually talking about is overlapping coding regions (not genes) and the overlap is usually only a few nucleotides. I don't think it deserves much coverage in this article; besides, there's already an entire article on Overlapping gene and another on Nested gene.

 * Genome42 (talk) 20:10, 2 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I agree that work should start from this page (assuming consensus is reached) and work outwards to harmonise. If we decide to include more than one example of each major class of definition, a simplified but updated version of this table or similar could help. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 02:32, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Your link brings up an issue that’s really important. The authors claim that genes are currently (2017) defined as DNA sequences that specify a protein then makes the further case that the current definition conflicts with the discovery of alternative splicing.
 * I think that’s incorrect and I can document my claim by quoting numerous textbook over the past 50 years that have defined a gene in a way that includes noncoding genes such as those for ribosomal RNA and tRNA.
 * How do we deal with conflicts like this? Do we have to give credence to every scientist who makes incorrect, misleading, or controversial statements because that’s what the Wikipedia culture demands or should we concentrate on giving the general public the best consensus view of knowledgeable scientists? Genome42 (talk) 18:45, 9 March 2023 (UTC)
 * @Genome42 - Sorry for the late reply on this. In the case of "One Gene -> One Protein", it should definitely be mentioned as a potential (common?) misconception or oversimplification and the reasons listed/explained. If it was fair simplification at one time then that should probably be mentioned (a bit like the Bohr atomic model), but I'm note sure this is really the same.
 * In general, if something is an uncommon misconception, then it can be easily omitted (or only briefly mentioned) to avoid WP:FALSEBALANCE. Similarly, WP:FRINGE positions can just be omitted. Genuinely common misconceptions (popular press, obsolete model, counterintuitive situation, oversimplification, misconception from another field etc), should generally be mentioned but immediately corrected (e.g. the misconception orthogenesis/progressionism in Evolution). A summary table would only be useful for when there are multiple reasonable alternative definitions that are commonly used by experts in relevant fields where we're at least alerting readers that alternative defs exist that come at an issue from different angles.
 * Also, since we now have a Definitions section, I've moved the Functional definitions subsection into it. Much of that subsection is now a bit redundant, so most can probably be omitted as the section as a whole is refined and condensed. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 03:26, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Which misconception are you referring to? Is it the misconception that all genes encode proteins or the misconception that protein-coding genes can only encode a single kind of functional polypeptide chain? Genome42 (talk) 12:19, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * In this case, both. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 03:55, 21 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Which misconception are you referring to? Is it the misconception that all genes encode proteins or the misconception that protein-coding genes can only encode a single kind of functional polypeptide chain? Genome42 (talk) 12:19, 20 March 2023 (UTC)
 * In this case, both. T.Shafee(Evo & Evo)talk 03:55, 21 March 2023 (UTC)

 * There don't seem to any objections to deleting the second-last paragraph of the lead so I have removed it because there is an extended discussion of gene definition elsewhere in the article. Genome42 (talk) 14:50, 7 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I saw Evo&Evo's post on the WP:MOLBIO talk page about the definitions section and I took a crack at rewriting it with a focus on brevity while trying to address some of the concerns discussed above. You can find it in my userspace here. This condenses the definitions section from ~1500 words to ~200 words, so a lot of neat details are gone, but some can likely be migrated to the History section or their relevant main article (if they are not already there).
 * I don't see why the definitions section should be very long at all if the goal is to provide extra context to what is meant be either the Mandelian or molecular gene. Extra nuance, such as the definition proposed by the linked 2017 article above, is probably too technical for such a general article. ― Synpath 01:47, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for taking an interest. Here's how I see it. We have several different audiences. The "general audience" probably doesn't care very much about the exact definition so the long version just looks like history to them.
 * The science crowd consists of readers who are interested in science and have probably taken an undergraduate course in biology. They have been bombarded with information about genes and how the old concepts are completely wrong and need to be drastically revised in the genomics era. It's likely they have heard some version of the story that old fuddy-duddy scientists (like me) thought that all genes encoded proteins and we couldn't adjust to the new ideas coming out of ENCODE and Evelyn Fox Keller. The long version is intended to correct that misconception.
 * Then there's the Wikipedians who are anxious to edit articles like this by inserting short references to statements "proving" that a new definition of gene is required because of alternative splicing and noncoding RNAs (and other things). It will be easy for them to do this with the short version but the longer version will (I hope) be more resistant to attacks from other editors.
 * It's a shame that we have to think about ways of protecting accurate science from well-intentioned, but uniformed, Wikipedia editors but it's a fact of life in 2023. Genome42 (talk) 18:23, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I definitely don't know enough about Wikipedia to come down with a strong opinion on this. My intuition says an encyclopedia should prioritize the general audience, especially with a topic like this with such a broad cultural impression. That's why I opted for writing a shorter definitions section in hopes of increased accessibility. Maybe that's only most appropriate for the lede.
 * Also, I just noticed the hatnote pointing to the dab page doesn't use the molecular gene definition. I'll move the dab page definition over to the hatnote. ― Synpath 18:49, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

Mutation rate
I don’t think we need to discuss mutation rate in this article since it is covered elsewhere. But if we include it, we should at least get it right.

The overall DNA error rate per replication is about 10^-10 - it includes the DNA replication error rate of 10^-8 and the fact that 99% of these errors are repaired. That gives 0.3 mutations per haploid genome per replication.

The mutation rate per generation in humans is not the same as the mutation rate per replication. The two papers that are referenced refer to the per generation mutation rate (10^-8). Thus every newborn baby has about 60 (2 X 30) new mutations according to this mutation rate - the latest data is closer to 100 mutations per human generation. Genome42 (talk) 02:07, 5 December 2023 (UTC)

 * I strongly recommend that we delete the section on "Molecular evolution" since it doesn't belong here and the material is covered elsewhere. The material in the subsection on "Mutation," for example, is covered in Mutation rates where the mutation rate in humans is said to be 50-90 mutations per generation. This conflicts with the value of 30 that was just added to this article. (The Mutation article is closer to being correct and the value stated here is wrong. The actual value is probably closer to 100 but we'll deal with that in the Mutation article.)
 * This example illustrates the problem with redundancy. When the main article is updated and corrected, the other entries become wrong and this helps spread misinformation and confusion. Genome42 (talk) 21:14, 10 December 2023 (UTC)

Book "How Life Works" (2023) worth considering?
A review by scientist Denis Noble of a new book entitled "How Life Works: A User’s Guide to the New Biology" (2023) by Philip Ball (editor of the journal Nature) may be worth considering? - iac - Stay Safe and Healthy !! - Drbogdan (talk) 04:51, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

 * Nonsense. Denis Noble is not a credible authority on genes and neither is Philip Ball. I haven't got my copy of Phil's book yet but I'm familiar with his earlier writings. This is very controversial and bound to get us into bitter edit wars. Genome42 (talk) 18:25, 7 February 2024 (UTC)

Drbogdan (talk) 04:51, 6 February 2024 (UTC)

title: Talk:Gene