So far we've been aiming at undergrad-level physics students and higher
not the general public
@RakshitPai I suppose that is true
The issue with simple questions of the kind that the general public (i.e. people who aren't educated in physics) ask is that they can easily be ill-defined, and basically all we can meaningfully say is "physics can't answer this question"
@DavidZaslavsky People who aren't formally educated in physics but are curious about how things work could come up with questions like, "how does gravity work" or "how do you determine the gravitational pull on objects"
I think that it is ok to answer simple questions. They attract more people and we need any promotion in the beginning. Also, there are probably not so many popular trivial questions about relativity of quantum mechanics and they have to be answered once but will attract people forever :)
As a physics undergrad, I think that some of the problems explored and formulas derived in a course on undergraduate mechanics, modern physics, thermo, and electromagnetism are really elegant, subtle and beautiful. I have a nice collection of these types of problems in my notes and I would love to see more of them discussed on this site.
@Ami so would I. I'm tempted to say that we might be better off ignoring the advice we got from higher up about "seeding" (asking questions you already know the answer to)
i.e. they said don't do it - I think it was on one of the SO blog posts
by the way: for anyone who doesn't know the interface, if you hover over the right side of any chat message you'll see three little icons which can be used to flag the message, star it (like upvoting), or reply to it respectively
@DavidZaslavsky I know what you mean but experts should first learn about this site which is what this discussion is about. I don't suggest answering every simple question but there are few that appear all the time.
I agree with David about the quality of the site. In the last few days there have been lots of nice questions as advanced as AdS/CFT and the front page already has a little better feel thanks to it
@gigacyan okay, well we can keep an eye out for good simple questions. I guess the important thing is that the question can be answered in a high-quality way
If you have ideas for simple questions that can still solicit great answers, I'd say just ask them
@Ami: it was nice in that it made people think a lot. But I am not sure it's very useful as far as answers go and so on. I don't think Q&A based site that doesn't have a reasonable format for discussions is actually good for these types of questions
About the promotion: I was trying to put together the posters but I didn't get to it in the end. Perhaps over the Christmas. Does anyone has good ideas about what should go into such poster (e.g. just questions, or also answers? And what questions concretely?)
Thats the type of question (the one I posted from programmers) has a wide enough appeal that I'd be happy to post on my facebook page. I think a question like that would be great for promotion of the physics site too.
@mbq: those sites actually refer to us? that's pretty great. I love both qiao's and marco's blogs. perhaps it wouldn't be so hard to convince others as well
@mbq: sure. well, I am not really knowledgeable about how various blogs stands but I think TRF must be pretty high (it won science category in wordpress last year, or something like that)
It wouldn't be hard or out of line to send email to people running higher-traffic blogs. I've mentioned it a few times on ScienceBlogs, and you could probably get one or more of the Cosmic Variance bloggers to mention it.
@ami: definitely. As Jeff pointed out on meta, if a professional physicist takes a look on the site they are not likely to come back. We have to bring the good stuff (and there is some good stuff already) directly under their noses
Google is good promoter. If you search any question title you get first link to Physics.SE, so we should post questions that physicists are likely to search in google.
General relativity says that spacetime is a Lorentzian 4-manifold $M$ whose metric satisfies Einstein's field equations. I have two questions:
What topological restrictions do Einstein's equations put on the manifold. For instance, the existence of a Lorentz metric implies some topological th...
Hamiltonian's principle states that a dynamic system always follows a path such that action integral is stationary (that is maximum or minimum).
Why should action integral be stationary? On what basis did Hamilton stated this principle?
I've seen videos of people in space (on ISS) who squeeze a bottle or something and liquid comes out, it then separates into smaller balls.
Why is this surely it should stay pretty much together because theres no gravity from the Earth so the liquid should attract itself?
Hello,
I am looking for some literature on the Ising model, but I'm having a hard time doing so. All the documentation I seem to find is way over my knowledge.
Can you direct me to some documentation on it that can be parsed by my puny undergrad brain? If the answer is negative, can you explain...
There's an essential tension between wanting to have more expert-level discussions and at the same time wanting more overall traffic. The number of physicists out there just isn't that large.
My suggestion is attract more people first and sort them out later. It means simpler questions at the beginning that might scare away some experts but I think it is better then very slow growth with only high level questions.
For whatever reason, mathematicians have really embraced social media, while physicists have not to the same degree. It's kind of like the way that nobody has yet managed a life-science analogue of the arxiv, despite several attempts.
mathematical stuff can actually always be deduced. in physics one makes all kinds of assumptions and approximations that deserve to be explained but are not usually
@DavidZaslavsky I realized my mistake: I was only thinking of attracting people who will ask questions but it is more important to find people willing to answer them.
People who use math.SE do so because they have an appreciation for beautiful mathematics. People who come to physics.se may do so for one of two reasons: 1) to better understand the world in a tangible intuitive way, 2) because the derivations and the math involved are amazingly elegant in a way that is parallel but also very distinct from pure mathematics.
@gigacyan true. Though I guess we need both to some extent. Anyway I do appreciate the thought you're putting into this, even if I may disagree sometimes
@DavidZaslavsky You might want to go farther out than that, what with the holidays-- early January might be better. Unless there's some urgent need to boost traffic sooner.
So far Physics.SE is the only place where people may ask questions on natural sciences and they will continue doing it until there is an alternative place.
a place where people can ask any question that is sophisticated enough (we'll have to discuss this more later) and get answer to any level of depth (down to QFT if needed) they'd like
in particular, I don't want it to be just all string theory and research. that should be left for TP.SE. but there are still lot's of great questions (particularly real world phenomena) that can be explained from first principles
@mbq: it's obviously subjective. but to give an example, I like Sklivvz questions on derivation of optical properties from QED. actually, those questions are little too hard and broad (though OP can't be supposed to know that; we have to suggest ways to improve the questions ourselves) but in general that's the kind of questions I like best
regarding the population, well it'll be obviously hard to answer such questions until we attract reasonable number of experts (I'd tried to give an answer myself but there are people who could've done a lot better job)
@Marek So you except intellectual rut like MO; this may not work since physicist have smaller amount of built-in primevalism that mathematicians. (Because of the blessing of experiments, of course)
Each spring enormous amounts of water rise up in trees and other vegetation. What causes this stream upwards?
Edit: I was under the impression that capillary action is a key factor: the original question therefore was: what are the fundamental forces involved in capillary action?
Can perhaps a...
I've read about the idea that buckyballs and other nanostructures could be used to hold drugs and things until they reach certain places in the body and then get released.
So I was wondering, if you created a buckyball in air, so that some molecules that are in air (such as oxygen and nitrogen) ...
@DavidZaslavsky Don't you think that such questions are an occasion for great answers? Not all of course, but it is a game worth playing. And they are Google magnets.
@mbq sure, makes sense to me. The only concern (rather, the only thing that could be a concern, though I am not personally worried about it) is that what constitutes a great answer to us may not be a great answer to the asker, e.g. if someone asks why the sky is blue, they might not want to hear about the details of Rayleigh scattering because it might go over their head.
@mbq: I am not sure. I think undergradute students have enough knowledge to address questions of the popular level. so the site might prosper. one can imagine those students asking questions in turn here that get answered by graduates and a little higher and then TP.SE as a genuine top of the pyramid
@mbq: hm, you are right. These are actually those elementary questions that require deep answers I was talking about
Ideally, PNS would need to have someone to detect these and send them to us. But I wonder if it will attract such a userbase. Me, I am probably not joining the site
@mbq Right. For instance, I would rather see the question about the sky's color get a solid and slightly technical answer (Rayleigh scattering) on physics.SE than be migrated to pns.SE and perhaps get a hand-wavy, non-quantitative answer there.
Although if PNS manages to take off and define itself somehow, I might change my mind
I'd say there's friction between the gas and the ground
when you're talking about the molecules... some gas molecules loose energy colliding with the ground, but others gain energy, so I wouldn't call it friction
actually, I made an implicit assumption (perhaps wrong) that the ground would cool quicker and therefore the energy would flow mainly from atmosphere to the ground. but thinking on it, perhaps ground has a bigger heat capacity and would therefore remain hotter than the atmosphere which would lose most of its energy via radiation
not much. just some good ideas were thrown around. and now I remember I forgot to mark them up for future generations. I will have to go through the history later
actually, we were thinking about letting some blogs know about us and hopefully link to us
Hamiltonian's principle states that a dynamic system always follows a path such that action integral is stationary (that is maximum or minimum).
Why should action integral be stationary? On what basis did Hamilton stated this principle?
Hello,
I am looking for some literature on the Ising model, but I'm having a hard time doing so. All the documentation I seem to find is way over my knowledge.
Can you direct me to some documentation on it that can be parsed by my puny undergrad brain? If the answer is negative, can you explain...
