What exactly is the point of accepting an answer? Once all the answers are up, its a bit meaningless to say that you accept one particular answer. Perhaps the only reason to have an accept button is to close the question and put it in a "resolved" category. Is this its purpose?
(I'd appreciate i...
I was sleeping during this session.... (participation from Europe requires to schedule it in the american morning!) I don't understand your quesrtion on the relativitiy book. I like the book by Misner/Thorne/Wheeler on gravitation, and I know essentially no more about general relativity as you can find there.
How allowed is "bumping" a neglected, old, and unanswered question? As in making an insignificant edit so that it comes to the front page? A few days ago I saw some awesome unanswered questions, which would have been easily answered by most of the people here.
Today I went through all 600 unanswered,questions, answered some of them and upvoted some reasonable answers to others. Some others have the answer essentially in the comments, and of course there were many where i didn't feel competent ot that were to vague to know what to say.
Well, as my competence regarding details covers only a small part of physics, I didn't have to look at all questions in detail. I scanned through the list of headers, selected maybe 50 for which I felt motivated, read what was there, and decided what to do. (I am used to scanning things for what I am looking for. Sometimes I need to go recursively through perhaps 1000 references in scholar.google in less than a day.)
@ArnoldNeumaier another way you could go at it is to start by looking at the list of unanswered questions for a few tags that are relevant
by the way, thanks for the answer on elastic constants; that's the way I'll go if I can't find any other good reference, and in fact I already have a hunch about which terms dominate and why
but I was trying to find out what is "standard" in this field to analyze such complex tensors, before I write my own and the referee then says "oh, but why didn't you simply calculate the anisotropic Whatshisname matrix? it is exactly designed for that type of low symmetry" :)
@ArnoldNeumaier makes sense. I'm not that competent either (less than you, atleast--seeing your answers), but I enjoy reading the questions even if I know I can't answer them. The comments provide great insights at times.. :D
Anyone up for a little philosophical discussion? ;-)
What would you say physics is? What is physics?
Some people object to certain things physicist try to do, dismissing it as not real physics. I'd like to say, physics is describing nature / the world using mathematics ( + the experimental method). But then there are a number of things, such as mathematical ecology, that certain people wouldn't accept as physics.
So it seems to me, physics, as seen even by some physicists, is merely defined by tradition: the traditional topics that "physicists" study. There's no concise way to define it.
Still, it's worth mentioning that it's physicists who usually have the skill to work with mathematical models, so even those who do e.g. mathematical ecology often turn out to have a training in physics.
The whole thing becomes a not so philosophical issue e.g. when it comes to approving thesis topics.
Well, there is pure physics (theoretical and experimental) and applied physics (all the rest if it using physical theories), whereas mathematical ecology uses mathematical techiques from physics but not its theories. The models there are soft, not based on physical laws.
@Arnold That is a good point. Physics has the ambition to go down to the lowest level. Explain the motion of particle with mechanics, and explain how a fluid behaves using the particles its made of, etc. There's a full chain down to the lowest level. But there isn't a full chain when you look at how many rabbits are there on the meadow. There might be some regularities, e.g. Lotka Volterra, but there's no full chain from the rabbit to the Schroedinger equation. At least in practice. :-)
It is like in math. Mathematicians work after their degree often in software engineering because they are good at programming and abstract thinking, not because what is done there is interesting mathematics.
@ArnoldNeumaier I disagree there. Using these methods is not more trivial in "other fields" than in "physics". It's not the same as going from research to application.
Is there a way to undelete a question? I deleted it, and now when I try to re-post it, I cannot as the system recognizes it as a duplicate question.
