Should we have a Popular Physics SE?

Question

I've been looking through the new Physics Overflow beta¹ and looking back at some of the discussion about the closure of the Theoretical Physics SE. From a purely personal perspective I would prefer research level questions to be asked here because though it's very unlikely I could answer any it's interesting to see other peoples answers. However I appreciate that active physicists don't want to wade through acres of basic questions from non-physicists.

At the same time there are lots of non-physicists interested in physics as shown by the proliferation of science programmes on TV, and I believe strongly that there should be a site for anyone interested in physics to get clear and authoritative answers to questions at this level. I think Stack Exchange is the best place for such a site because it's designed to reduce the junk and advocacy that swamps other less regulated fora.

The approach taken by the Theoretical Physics SE, and now the Physics Overflow, is to split off the most advanced questions, but history shows you end up with a site with very low traffic. I wonder if it would be better to split off the low level questions.

In my perfect world that would leave the Physics SE at a higher level and hopefully manage to both attract back the higher level users and keep the traffic high enough to keep the site vibrant. The Popular Physics SE would provide interested bystanders with their answers, and maybe it could take a more lenient attitude to homework.

My perfect world doesn't exist, of course, and there are obvious problems such as how to decide which site to post questions on. My suggestion would be to use Physics SE for undergraduate and above level questions and Popular Physics for everything below this. I note the blurb for the Physics SE still says Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students (my emphasis). Assuming we treat the sites as siblings, migration between them (mostly from Physics to Popular Physics I'd guess) would be less of a big deal than attempting migration to unrelated sites like the Math SE.

I think that's about it - I will be very interested to hear other views on the idea.

¹ Note that the Physics Overflow is not part of the Stack Exchange network

Answer 1

Phys.SE is currently 3.5 years old and has the second-most traffic of all the science sites at SE (with Math.SE being number one), so at least in that sense it is quite successful[1]. Also Phys.SE receives a lot of Google hits and is quite visible on the Internet. So Phys.SE has in many ways found a robust formula, which is spelled out on the help pages:

Physics Stack Exchange is for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy. We welcome questions of all levels, but please stick to the following topics [...]

We should not let events outside Phys.SE (which might be just a flash in the pan, like the previous TP.SE) dictate what is and what is not the purpose of Phys.SE. We welcomed all levels before, and we should continue to welcome all levels. By splitting up Phys.SE in many parts, we may very well destroy the formula, which has worked in the past.

Besides the theoretical reasons to keep all levels at Phys.SE, there might also be practical reasons: It may be practically impossible to establish an unanimous definition of what constitutes high, medium, and low level, and so forth.

Concerning high-level questions: You can still ask high-level questions on Phys.SE! We are open 24/7 and it is business as usual. One thing that we learned from the TP.SE failure (with its unfortunate slow traffic) is that if you ask a high-level question, there might only be a few experts in the world that can answer on the spot. Many more experts would be able to answer after "doing the calculation themselves", however they often haven't the time. But if they are curious enough they might do it anyway! So long story short: One should expect that high-level quality answers take time. Phys.SE offers a visible platform on the Internet and has many active (and also some more dormant) experts in all corners of physics. If you have a high-level question in physics, then Phys.SE is definitely one of the best places to ask it, in terms of receiving a useful answer.

Concerning low-level questions: We should continue to enforce that questions should preferably be conceptional. E.g. low-level homework questions should follow certain rules. Moreover, some basic/minimal research of the topic (like googling before asking) is generally expected, cf. this meta post. As for a discussion of a Popular Physics site, that seems to belong to Area51 rather than on Phys.SE.

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[1] In fact one interpretation of the large traffic volume is that we are drowning in success: The front page currently changes every 6 hours (or so), which means that it is easier to overlook a post nowadays, relatively speaking.

Answer 2

I think that a popular physics site would be a bad idea within the format of voting and assuming that a highly voted questions will be correct.

a) Most of the people voting will be non physicists

b) few knowledgable physicists will be consistently checking every day

This will result in arbitrary votes and even wrong ones, not exactly cranks but half informed people pushing successfully their half informed opinions.

Truth in science is not arrived at by consensus of the hoi polloi.

The only way this might work would be if the people answering were high reputation people from physics.SE and the popularphysics.SE registered users would not be allowed to answer, only to comment maybe. Anyway this is outside the format of SE.

Edit: Let me add some thoughts here

Over the two+ years I have been following physics.SE the level of physics has fallen. I was first alerted to the existence of the site by Lubos and in the beginning there were a number of good answers to questions that stretched my little grey cells( well women are supposed to have white ones :) , so treat it as a saying ). A lot of people with a better knowledge of physics than I have left for various reasons the site, or are completely inactive. Very few questions appear in my area of expertise ( experimental particle physics) and the reason I persist is in order to exercise my teaching muscles over the repetitive naive questions of young students ( and keep those grey cells active in my retirement). Better than scrabble after all.

So I hope the physicsoverflow will be successful even if not jumping with activity, where I can follow something challenging and new.I am essentially saying that the format of voting, when the numbers become large and experts become a small percentage of the populace essentialy leads to a popularphysics ambiance. You cannot ask that everybody participating has a physics degree after all,because the SE objectives include students in highschool. physics overflow explicity puts the limit at graduate level upward questions so I hope it will succeed in keeping a high level.

Answer 3

24 hours on, and whatever the rights and wrongs of my suggestion it's clear that the site members as a whole don't feel strongly about the issue. Only ten votes have been cast on my question, and at the time of writing the most active answer only has six votes (three up and three down).

Starting a new SE site, or even reviving Dilaton's Area 51 proposal would be a great deal of work, and there clearly isn't any enthusiasm for this. That makes the project a non-starter.

I'd guess most of the site members just don't think there's a problem, so agonising on how to address it is pointless. Unless anyone else wants to shout now, I'll leave it a day or so then accept this as the answer.

Answer 4

This is one aspect that is fundamentally different on the science sites on SE compared to many other sites on the network. Non-programmers generally don't ask questions on Stack Overflow, but a significant part of the questions on Physics, Chemistry and Biology are from a laymen perspective. This is inherent in the topics I suspect, programming just doesn't lend itself to this kind of questions from non-programmers, while many people are curious about basic facts and concepts from physics, chemistry or biology.

I rather dislike the idea of splitting a site according to some more or less arbitrary question level or difficulty. The practical problems of defining the boundary between sites alone are a huge headache. I think Math Overflow showed that this concept can work well at the very top of the question level, but I am not convinced that it would work as well if you add such separations at lower levels.

I'd also be very, very careful in examining what we want to achieve when we discuss splitting off a part of the site at the lower level. This can easily end up as a site that just gets all the trash from the higher-level site dumped onto it. A site that is created simply to get rid of certain questions we don't want here is doomed to fail.

I'm not saying that a Popular Physics site couldn't work, I actually do think that something like a Popular Science site could work if approached correctly. But such a site must have a positive definition of what it should be, it can't start as a category of questions we don't want here. I'd also include all natural sciences, I think just physics would be too narrow.

The definition of popular science is not really about difficulty level or effort in the question. The big difference is that such questions are asked by people without substantial education in the subject. This not only changes the question, but it also changes how answers should be written. This is also one aspect that would benefit the most from a separate site, as there it would be clear that answers need to be understandable by the general public.

But homework questions are not popular science questions. They are an entirely different category and I think making a popular science site into a homework dumping ground would doom it from the beginning.

I'm a moderator on Skeptics, and Skeptics is to some extent already a popular science site. We're more restrictive, but we often explain current scientific research in laymen terms. So I certainly think that such an effort is worthwhile, I don't regard popular science questions as somehow lower quality, but they need a different approach than questions from a scientist or student.

I'd be very careful about migration, it is often misused as a softer alternative to closing, and that would result in this site just dumping all the crap on the popular physics site. If such a site is created, it would have to prove that it works without any migration path.

Answer 5

I somehow don't like the idea of a split; I think the site is stronger together, and sometimes basic, naive questions actually have advanced answers, that might not be intelligible to the original poster, but are interesting for other people.

Could it be made easier to filter/hide popular physics questions? A clear button near the top of the page, "Hide basic questions" that removes all traces of basic physics for the user would suffice? To me, that is much more palatable than a physics overflow style breakaway.

Practically, it would be much simpler than your suggestion, though it would require every new question to be assigned basic or advanced status.