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Science proposals need your help! Consider committing to these, to make them successful & scientific:

See also the long list of science and technology proposals on Area 51.

Committers needed

Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Synthetic Biology

Site definition needed

Sites in beta

Science and technology sites currently in beta include:

Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Materials Modeling Stack Exchange Q&A site proposal: Operations Research Astronomy Earth Science History of Science and Maths Engineering Mathematics Educators Open Data

This is community wiki -- feel free to add other proposals worth mentioning.

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    $\begingroup$ @EnergyNumbers Great job maintaining this post -- thanks! $\endgroup$
    – user68
    Mar 22, 2012 at 13:54
  • $\begingroup$ Space Exploration close to beta! $\endgroup$
    – Alan Rominger
    Jul 12, 2013 at 21:06
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    $\begingroup$ I have just proposed a "Popular Science" site (through an extra account, though,) so that Popular Science Questions here could be redirected there in the future . $\endgroup$
    – Abhimanyu Pallavi Sudhir
    Jul 28, 2013 at 5:36
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    $\begingroup$ +1 Geosciences - that has one scope that exactly matches my areas of expertise. $\endgroup$
    – user29350
    Nov 2, 2013 at 20:46
  • $\begingroup$ Not sure how many would consider it a purely science site, but Worldbuilding is doing decently. The science-based tag is doing fairly well. $\endgroup$
    – HDE 226868
    Oct 25, 2014 at 15:56
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    $\begingroup$ Materials Modeling hasmoved to private beta! Come and ask your questions early on, we need all the support we can get to move to public beta. $\endgroup$
    – Tyberius
    May 16, 2020 at 22:32
  • $\begingroup$ @GaelC Do you see Synthetic Bio there? I don't. This is what it currently looks like for me. $\endgroup$
    – user1271772
    Jun 18, 2021 at 0:38

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I am an astrophysicist, but I don't like at all the idea of having a separate site for astrophysics and astronomy.

First, in astrophysics more than in any other branch, contents are strongly related to other fields. Just to mention a few of them: spectroscopy, plasma physics, numerical modelling, fluid dynamics, nuclear physics, Newtonian dynamics, General Relativity, Thermodynamics, particle physics... And so I am very interested in showing my questions to physicists from other branches. Cross-feeding is a source of richness.

It would be nearly absurd, and the moderators would have to be always deciding if the questions belong to the site or not... Nearly all branches of physics are related or directly involved in one or another topic in astrophysics.

Second, although there are many users in physics SE, very few are high-level physicists. More fragmentation means loss of quality.

A separate site for Astrophysics? No, thanks!

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    $\begingroup$ People want an astronomy site where they can post questions about telescopes - what to buy, when to buy, best way of viewing so and so. To increase traffic and the chances of it not dying a second slow death, astrophyics has been added, even though it plays a significant part to traffic here already. $\endgroup$
    – Physiks lover
    Dec 2, 2012 at 18:49
  • $\begingroup$ That fits very well inside physics. Nearly every astrophysicist I know is also an amateur astronomer. I myself have spent lots of nights as a teenager out in the forest with my father and a Newton telescope. Now I can add my knowledge in positional astronomy and my experience in big telescopes (I have been for example in WHT in La Palma, as 4-meter telescope). It is very good to join amateur astronomers with physicists and astrophysicist, believe me. $\endgroup$
    – Eduardo Guerras Valera
    Dec 3, 2012 at 20:34
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    $\begingroup$ @Physikslover There are plenty of resources for that already, both on and off the internet, and most such things are opinions (maybe I don't care about eye relief, but someone else doesn't care about coma) not particularly suited for SE anyway. $\endgroup$
    – user10851
    Dec 8, 2012 at 20:38
  • $\begingroup$ @Eduardo I agree with everything completely, except for how much professional astronomers mix with amateurs. Unfortunately I see a lot of disdain from the professionals for anyone who can point out a constellation. $\endgroup$
    – user10851
    Dec 8, 2012 at 20:43
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(merging from other meta thread I made about this)

My area is not physics. However, this was the best thing that Stack Exchange had to offer me, and I decided I really liked it, so I've been active here for a number of months (I mostly used the username zassounotsukushi). Lately I started to think it might be worthwhile to make an Area 51 attempt for Nuclear Engineering, which is what I do.

http://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/38647/nuclear-engineering

We already have a tag for it! At 25 questions it's not much, but most nuclear questions are blatantly not relevant to Physics SE anyway, so I figure, who knows what you would get if you invited questions about it?

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/nuclear-engineering

I haven't yet, but I recognize that in order for the proposal to succeed I would need to plaster it around nuclear related listserves, message boards, maybe use fliers, and get other people to help it go viral as well.

You could make arguments for why this may or may not work, but I could see it working. The Electrical Engineering SE comes to mind, which is funny because I never found that to be very useful, just because the knowledge is so incredibly specific to the application and broad as well. Nuclear is much more narrow, but if you allow fairly practical and specific (to regulations, designs, etc) then there's certainly no end to the obscurity of questions you could encounter.

Either way, I would love to see lots of people from this site share what they think at the proposal. I'm wondering if 200 people is more than we could hope to recruit, or if we could ever have a high enough volume of questions. But the entire point of stack exchange kind of feels like controlled anarchy anyway, so might as well start it out and see what happens, right?

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    $\begingroup$ Who'd have thought zassounotsukushi was a bloke called Alan? Not me (BTW, what is a zassounotsukushi?). I've added your proposal into the question. $\endgroup$
    – 410 gone
    Mar 22, 2012 at 18:31
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    $\begingroup$ It's a mess of stuff from a Japanese drama Hana Yori Dango. And just curious, @EnergyNumbers isn't Prof. MacKay himself, right? That was my thinking from the first time I saw your icon b/c I was aware of the book :-P $\endgroup$
    – Alan Rominger
    Mar 22, 2012 at 18:36
  • $\begingroup$ No, I'm not :-) David & I agree on some things - such as sticking to the real science. And we disagree on one or two things ... $\endgroup$
    – 410 gone
    Mar 22, 2012 at 19:45
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There was a proposal about future studies/futurology (forecasting roughly within 100 years range), but it has now been removed due to inactivity.

The proposer had said about it:

it is based on personal interest and imho missing place on SE to ask questions concerning climate models (but hopefully climate modeling will just be on sub-topic of this site). It is not intended to ask questions, whether global warming exists etc. But to ask questions about underlying models of environmental/economic/demographic scenarios and assumptions (not more, not less) for forecasting of future developments.

If there wouldnt be math physics theophys sites on SE, i wouldnt have proposed it, as it would probably get a speculative mess with very low quality. So i would highly appreciate if some of the experts here would participate and help defining the site and draw the scope of answerable and good questions. Its hard, but imho for this topic can only work with a Q&A site with voting system. Ive posted a list of questions, feel free to copy paste some you agree with, so people can vote it.

Im not sure how theoreticalphysics.SE will deal with climate modeling theories/math. So maybe this gets a good place to migrate some questions and keeping tp.SE clean ;) from such (political) debates.

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