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Urs has posted a cafe post about TP.stackExchange here trying probably attracting good people to it. I have trouble posting to cafe and would not like a promotion discussion to be compromised so I open a discussion here.
very low ratio of decent research-level theoretical physics discussion on the web compared to the impressive amount of decent research-level mathematics discussion on the web
Well said Urs! In the early days of archive in mid 1990s I have once made a serach in archive for “Lectures” in the title of a paper. Search in cond-mat at the time had several hits (maybe 5 or 7, I do not quite remember). The high-energy-theory had over 100. That is, cond-mat people were more down to Earth, grants, money pressure, publication pressure than hep-th. Clsoer you go to applications and money, there is more discipline, higher publication pressure and less fairness and leisure to distribute insight publicly. Also, math is much less attractive to crackpots than physics, with some exception of number theory, which has out of proportion many dedicated amateurs.
Still TP has much to go before it gets to a fraction of achievement of MO. It is also good as a medium where we can sometimes make physicists aware of Lab by posting links when suitable.
I have trouble posting to cafe
I am not saying that I can not post at all, though it happens on some stations (I use several computers routinely) occasionally, but that I can not reedit once posted, that I have slow response in posting, that the submission often signals spurious errors and so on. It does not remember my data (every time I need to reenter my site, my email). It ignores the diacritics in my name. It is for me a slowlier, non-correctable medium and one can not get source of other’s peoples posts to quote properly LaTeX parts. This is one of the reasons I like Forum better as a medium.
I looked there again after a while, it seems that the TP.stackExchange seems still of very low activity in comparison to, say, MO. But it is good to have it. Any insider information on plans etc. ?
I certainly have no insider information.
(I was rather active there for a few months back for a while, but didn’t do anything there since. I had too many other things to care about…)
While it would be good to have more activity on TP.SE, it is already a success that it does not have the large amount of undesireable activity that haunts so many physics discussion boards.
Right. Thanks for the exchange.
The Theoretical Physics site didn’t have enough activity during the beta. It has been closed, and its content has been merged into Physics. You can download the data dump of all questions here (zip), or visit the Theoretical Physics chat.
This is really unfortunate, as physicsstackexchange has lower average quality and lower level. But worse, I see that my account which worked with TP.SE is not recognized for physicsstackexchange, so I can not even update my own post. It seems that with abandoning the section of stackexchange, the accounts were also purged. I actually do not find that low activity is that much of a trouble as long as the average quality of posts is useful.
Finally the worst think about SE policies:
Eventually, 90% of a site’s traffic should come from search engines.
This is outrageous.
Any comments, Urs ?
I agree. When I glanced over some of the discussion that went with the closure, I saw the original organizers of TP.SE say that they learned that it was a bad idea to do this project using the Stack-Exchange platform, for the reasons that you mention.
Also, I saw several people in that discussion say that they found the level of sophistication on the group too high. This really struck me. I am quite confident that the sophistication of the discussion was on average not higher than on MathOverflow. But this seems to be a general problem with physics: there seems to be the latent assumption that public physics discussion need not or should not be sophisticated. After all, everybody knows what energy is, and they discuss the origin of the universe on TV, so what else do we need?
Some admin person did make the following observation: he said that notably the programming/computer science SE group is thriving, and at a good level of sophistication and that: it is much harder for a layman to ask an interesting-sounding question on programming than on physics.
Anyway, I entirely agree that a research-level group for physics in parallel to the existing phyiscs group has been good and would be good to have in the future, even at low traffic. For me it’s not the rate of traffic, but the signal-to-noise ratio that matters. I’d rather see a single interesting post in a week than dozens of mediocre posts per day.
My impression from glancing at those discussions about the shutdown of TP.SE was that the orginal organizers of TP.SE might be thinking about trying again on another platform. But I don’t know, I am not involved in this.
For me it’s not the rate of traffic, but the signal-to-noise ratio that matters.
Exactly!
Here is now the next attempt: PhysicsOverflow.
Let’s hope for the best.
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