Talk:Kinetic term

Other terms?

This article is a great addition to the Wikipedia -- the phrase "kinetic term" is thrown around a lot, but maddeningly, usually without even an attempt at a definition...but to get to my point, so does "interaction term" (and less common, but actually mentioned in the article, is "mass term"...and doesn't there a "free" term too? I can't even find a name for that one).

Has there been any work towards adding similar pages for these other terms, and/or adding brief mention on the Lagrangian page? I'd be glad to help, but to be honest the reason I came here looking for these pages was because I'm pretty ignorant of the subject.

Thanks, Dzustin (talk) 22:59, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

Potential term

Echoing the comment above, it seems pretty silly that there does not exist a corresponding Potential term article. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.40.48.159 (talk) 13:24, 2 June 2020 (UTC)

Show metric explicitly

The metric tensor should be shown explicitly as in the second form here:

${\mathcal {L}}_{0}={\frac {1}{2}}\partial _{\mu }\phi \partial ^{\mu }\phi ={\tfrac {1}{2}}g^{\mu \nu }\partial _{\mu }\phi \partial _{\nu }\phi$

in order to conform to general covariance. JRSpriggs (talk) 14:52, 12 April 2025 (UTC)

I mean, that seems unecessary since its implicitly there. Raised notation means you raise it with the metric. Across literature its standard to not necessarily have the metric be explicit unless you are trying to make some sort of point by having it there, such as when going to curved spacetime. OpenScience709 (talk) 21:43, 12 April 2026 (UTC)