Too focused on theoretical physics? Or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?

Question

The vast majority of topics in this SE seem to be either school/college course related (i.e. with no relation to experimental practice) or academic topics related to all sorts of theoretical physics.

From my personal experience at many universities and research centers, the staff working in experimental physics departments greatly outnumbers those in theoretical physics, so I would expect much more focus on experimental questions in a general "physics" exchange.

I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?

Update:

based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related question is: "how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?" (quoting Daniel Sank)

Answer 1

There are two questions here:

I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics

No, and in my opinion there shouldn't be. The most important asset of this website is the set of users, because they create the content. As a user and an experimental physicist, I want all of the users looking at my questions. In my daily work as an experimental physicist, I benefit enormously by intimate collaboration with theorists. They notice important features in data, suggest good experiments, explain observed data, and provide useful calculations related to our experiments. Splitting the users seems unwise, in my opinion.

how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?

I think there are two reasons. First, there certainly was a bias against experiment questions here, and there's some recorded history on that issue. Once upon a time in 2014, I asked a question about lab equipment which attracted a number of close votes; certain users (who I surmise do not understand the nature of experimental physics), voted to close as "off-topic". The discussion arising from that (and other) incident lead to this meta post and its accepted and most-upvoted answer, which in my opinion suggests that questions of the type that I asked should be welcome here.

Now, has anything changed, i.e. are we better about allowing experimental physics questions to live here? My impression is that yes, things have changed. However, perhaps someone could run queries with the various experimental physics tags to see if we've actually gotten better.

Of course, I've only discussed whether or not the situation surrounding questions has improved. A functional Q&A site also needs answers. I can't say whether or not that situation has changed.

Second, I think the most important factor is that experimental physics is less well represented in written material than is theory across all forms of written information. In other words, if there's less experiment than theory on this site, it's probably because there's less experiment than theory at all in any written format. When you were a student, were you ever assigned to read a book on experimental physics [1]? In the highest impact physics magazines (Nature and Science) what's the representation of works focused on experiment? Experimental results are well received, but the techniques and engineering (the kinds of stuff I'd expect to be well served by Q&A) are not. Throughout my career, referee feedback on papers has pushed details on the experiment itself into the "supplementary information" section of the paper (which is not even peer reviewed!) [2]. When I review papers, I regularly have to push authors to include relevant details of the experiment into the main text, even when those details are critical to the message of the paper. I speculate, therefore, that the relatively low fraction of experiment-oriented material on this site correlates with the relatively low fraction of experiment-oriented material in physics literature at large.

P.S. I wrote this answer attempting to address the actual questions in the main post, and I wonder if those are the questions the author really wanted to address. An obvious related question could be "how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?"

[1] I wasn't. In fact my physics degree didn't even require basic electronics or even computer programming. It was very focused on theory.

[2] See for example the enormous supplement of the paper on quantum supremacy.

Answer 2

I also want to add my own summary of this discussion.

I think the bias towards physics theory questions can be indeed explained by the number of people concerned with physics theory. In my question, I only took professional physicists into consideration (such as employed an institutes and universities), of which a large share work in experimental physics. At least, from a point of view of solid state physics, where experiments can be relatively mundane and can be conceived, built and run by single persons (as opposed to high energy physics or cosmology).

However, when including all the school students, and even most undergraduate students, the situation changes. Most of them do no experimental physics, at least not in the way that they need to solve their own problems but instead stick to prepared protocols. However, they do have to solve their theory problems.

I believe when counting everyone who visits physics.SE (and not only professional physicists) the numbers indeed strongly tip towards behind theory heavy. So this is a natural explanation for the situation.

Answer 3

The vast majority of topics in this SE seem to be either school/college course related (i.e. with no relation to experimental practice) or academic topics related to all sorts of theoretical physics.

That's probably to do with what people have problems with that can be addressed practically on a site.

While a lot of people have trouble with theory note that many people self-studying don't ever do experiments (and it's not practical for them to try). Many people who do experiments as part of a course have hands-on help explaining the concepts in class before and during.

That leaves people doing their own research. Well that's a problem for the site as they'll typically have implementation specific issues that are not of use to a general audience. That kind of thing is probably better handled by networking with other researchers.

From my personal experience at many universities and research centers, the staff working in experimental physics departments greatly outnumbers those in theoretical physics, so I would expect much more focus on experimental questions in a general "physics" exchange.

It's not clear at all what you expect questions about experiments to be about or what you expect answers to be like.

On this site we're mainly docused on physics concepts. So a question asking for a concept to be explained makes sense here, but many questions about experiments will involved specific details (essentially engineering) of specific implementations of experiments. That's not really a good fit here as we want questions that are useful to a large audience.

I am wondering is there a separate SE aimed at experimental physics or how come there is so little experimental physics being asked here?

Update:

based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related question is: "how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?" (quoting Daniel Sank)

I don't think we should.

The issue here is that in answering questions on a specific implementation we're typically not answering questions on concepts.

As it stands it's perfectly acceptable for people to asking about experiments in terms of concepts (and this happens a lot - e.g. double slit experiment questions crop up frequently).

Answer 4

based on initial discussion here a further interesting and related question is: "how can we improve this site's accessibility where experimental physics is concerned?" (quoting Daniel Sank)

There should be penalties for those who participate in closing posts that are obviously not off-topic. I don't participate in reviewing posts very much, but I know there are rewards for doing so -- and therefore I suspect there are rewards for closing questions and users get more points for being trigger happy and over-moderating posts.