@DavidZaslavsky Hmm.. If you check out physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/planck , there are various things tagged planck. I think blackbody radiation is liable to be tagged planck as well. So i doubt that we can synonym-ify it to quantum-mechanics. It's better if we just delete it, IMO.
Thanks for the links! Looks like everyone's playing safe on this one. Enough reasons to do so :P
Regarding units, I don't think that WP would have anything about the non-intuitiveness of units; usually WP doesn't explain stuff. Yeah, but addind it to the tag wiki would be fine. I'll try that later.
@Manishearth Regarding the tag synonym meta question, it wouldn't hurt to delete the ones that have already been established, but I'm not sure if it's necessary. We may not need that thread anymore because I think the requirements for proposing synonyms have gone down.
@Manishearth There's no way (for moderators) to just delete a tag outright, it has to be merged into something
@DavidZaslavsky I can only think of merging it with untagged. Or proposing it at MSO.. Either way, too much work for something small. Someone has removed ussr from the one question (you?) it had, so it's gone now. Removing planck will be a bit of work and will clutter up the main page.
It's not exactly a good idea, but we could merge it with the all-encompassing quantum-mechanics The only questions tagged planck that don't have to do with QM are those two dealing with the PLANCK experiment.
@Manishearth Well, there are already a bunch of proposed synonyms not listed on that meta question. If you want to keep the meta question in sync with the existing list of synonyms, feel free, but it seems like a lot of work to me.
Merging a tag just converts it into the target tag on existing questions, whereas a tag synonym is a rule that converts it into the target tag on future questions
@Manishearth hm, maybe it's not 2500, but there is some minimum amount of reputation you need to have in order to use a tag that hasn't been used before
It's a human prejudice. We can perceive distance; so it's clear. We can't quantitatively perceive time (time flies when you're having fun and all that); so it's unclear
@DavidZaslavsky In chapter VIII "ON THE IDEA OF TIME IN PHYSICS" he takes the reader through a lofty theoretical argument which is air tight, but compared to the down-to-earth argument for distance it left me wondering "Was Feynman ever right about this guy!"
The concepts in that book are definitely tricky (as is the case with any book about relativity). I could see it being quite confusing for someone who doesn't already have a decent grounding in basic non-relativistic mechanics
@Skullpatrol So, kinematics, Newtonian mechanics, gravity, electromagnetism? In principle you should be fine to understand special relativity, perhaps you're just not learning it in the best way
If you want to really properly learn relativity (as in, how to actually use it), I wouldn't recommend Einstein's book
Well in that case, if you have trouble understanding the content of this book, don't worry about it. You learn about relativity much better by actually using it than by reading about it.
@DavidZaslavsky I personally think that the physics professors who first read Einstein's book took the ideas and, as you said, changed them to a form that is actually usable.
Generally, no I don't. You're better off taking the benefit of all the work people have put into distilling and reformulating the ideas since they were first introduced.
@DavidZaslavsky Before I go I'd like your opinion on a quotation by Feynman. It went something like "I prefer to keep my feet on the ground with empirical evidence rather than have my head in the clouds with theories ... unlike giants like Einstein who can do both."
@DavidZaslavsky if you remove the tag from all questions, it gets automatically deleted after one week being unused (or something like that)
also, while we were doing tag-cleaning on French.SE, we simply asked someone from the SE staff to do a mass tag deletion (too many posts) without bumping the questions
Anyone see the vote count on physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22067/… ? It's pretty strange. IMO, the question is excellent, though naïve. You won't find the answer to that one easily. I think that only questions that show no obvious effort/obvious trolling should be downvoted (since there's no such thing as a 'wrong question'), though of course it's everyone's own choice..
I gave one of the downvotes. The down button says: ''It is unclear or not useful''.
I think it is both. Unclear since (as pointed out repeatedly) it is quite subjective how one counts, useless as one cannot expect anythin of value from a coincidence of such disparate counts; as the agreement of two small natural numbers is very frequent. - I gave only a few downvotes so far, but if a different voting behavior is desired, the button should say so.
I personally wouldn't downvote questions like that, but like Manishearth said it's up to everyone's judgement. Downvoting is basically for any sort of behavior you want to discourage.
@Fx They try only to do that if you have a large number (many tens or hundreds) of posts with the tag.
In recent days, we've had a bunch of new (and not-so-new) users making great contributions to the site, and there has been a distinct uptick in meta activity. So I thought it would be a neat idea to capitalize on this by having a brief chat session where we - or at least, whoever's available - ca...
While this is going on, Manishearth posted some interesting topics of discussion in an answer to the meta question (linked above). @Fx, @ArnoldNeumaier, @Dilaton, @AlanSE, @MarkEichenlaub if you have any thoughts on those I would be very interested to hear them.
@Skullpatrol any particular aspect of it you wanted to bring up today?
Anyway, I would actually like to bring up the topic of unanswered questions (@Skullpatrol if you don't mind, let's leave those books aside just for the moment)
Just to pick one thing out of the list to focus on
Other sites have had weekly or monthly "Answer the Unanswered" events in chat to try to improve their answer rate. I would like to get that going here, if we can manage it. Any thoughts?
@Dilaton It's basically just pinging someone using their account ID number instead of their display name. It works even if the person hasn't been in the chat room recently (or has a two-letter name)
As for unanswered questions, basically I'm wondering, who would be willing to participate in a push to get questions answered? And how should we do it?
@Fx No, you're right, it's definitely the case that we are lacking regular expert contributors in some fields. But I think that there are a few unanswered questions that current contributors can handle with a bit of research.
You may have a point that the amount we stand to gain from a push is limited.
I'm imagining something like this: a few of us get together in chat, each pick a question to answer, and over the next week we go out and do whatever research is necessary to give it an answer
Maybe one could sort unanswered questions according to their tags and then notice people who are strong in answering in these tags? Superping them and say "You have a question to answer here" or something like that, send them 50 emails per hour, etc ;-)
@Dilaton It's a good idea, but our ability to contact people who haven't volunteered to be contacted is limited. Superpings might be okay though (I'd have to check on that).
Perhaps we could use a chat event or a meta question to build up a list of people who would like to volunteer to answer an unanswered question.
I suppose it will be more productive to try to make sure we're catching questions with good answers as they're asked
which I think we mostly do
(Personally I tend to hold back to give other people a chance to answer first, and also because I spend a lot of time moderating rather than answering)
Hm I`m not sure, I`d still be happy to get new or better answers on my older questions; and answered questions are not only useful for the asker but for other people just browsing aimlessly around at SE (as I like to do when bored :-)... ) too.
@DavidZaslavsky well, on the topic of unanswered questions, I've tried my first "real physics" question but noone wants it (physics.stackexchange.com/questions/22074)
does the site has some materials science regulars?
I alway like it to start with something like this: uduality.blogspot.com, to pick up the newest gossip. The sidebar on the left shows some interesting blogs with the titles of the latest posts.
@ArnoldNeumaier Pardon my interruption Professor, but could I get your opinion on the learning usefulness of the book Relativity: the Special and General Theory?
The sidebar does seem to include most of the major players in the physics blogging community (that I've heard of, anyway), so that's definitely a good resource
Anyway, it's been an hour and I have to go do some work, but thanks everyone for showing up! I'm sure there will be more attempts to make good use of our chat room in the near future.
What other Physics Q&A sites are there?
How would you compare them to stackexchange? (Level of questions, size of user base, etc)
What exactly is the point of having badges? Do we get any special privileges with certain badges? Or is it a feature that may be used in the future?
Is there any relationship between human magnetic field and body temperature?
I am looking for studies on this topic.
