22
votes
Accepted
What are the goals of this site?
The conception of the founding members is expressed in the tour:
Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics and astronomy.
Now, ...
14
votes
Why is everyone so keen to answer physics questions by writing down tons of equations?
There is more than one kind of physics question, and more than one kind of physics answer.
Some questions ask for getting an "idea" or "intuition" of how something works, ...
ACuriousMindMod
- 123k
12
votes
Accepted
Can we reduce the scientific terms?
As mentioned in the welcome message, this site is
a question and answer site for active researchers, academics and students of physics.
This means that the bulk of the discussion on this site will ...
- 131k
10
votes
What are the goals of this site?
Seems to me this `site' is one of those entities that exists in the perpetual state of an identity crisis. When I read: "Physics Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for active researchers, ...
- 14.2k
8
votes
Why is everyone so keen to answer physics questions by writing down tons of equations?
I feel like this question is at least partially based on some bias in what answers you notice...
What makes you think everyone is keen to answer questions based on equations instead of explanations?
...
- 15.2k
8
votes
Are two questions that only differ in the desired level of sophistication of the answer duplicates?
Premise: two posts asking the same question are not, by default, duplicates if they are both explicit about the desired level of sophistication, and they are significantly different levels.
Let us be ...
7
votes
What are the goals of this site?
Here is my 2 cents, as a low-rep user of this site.
First of all many of the sites on this network appear to be dysfunctional (with the exception of the super dorky ones, because dorks are typically ...
- 622
5
votes
Are two questions that only differ in the desired level of sophistication of the answer duplicates?
No, these questions are not duplicates.
Why?
The answers are vastly different. An answer about a quantum mechanics question to a grad student will probably be (to generalize) math heavy, highly ...
- 7,029
5
votes
What are the goals of this site?
I am an A level physics student, and whilst I see people using this as a homework site, there are students like me who use this site to expand knowledge through asking questions and viewing others' ...
- 1,184
4
votes
How to deal with questions based on videos?
Besides the points made in the answers by David Z & Emilio Pisanty, make sure to mention in the question
lecturer, title, etc, of video, so the link can be recreated in case of link rot.
minute ...
QmechanicMod
- 196k
4
votes
What can be done to improve Physics.SE as an active forum for physics researchers and student's?
If you are a user who just want to read good posts without having to sift through poor posts, read on.
With the current traffic (November 2017), it only takes in average 5 hours for a post to ...
QmechanicMod
- 196k
4
votes
Accepted
Tags for calibrating answers to the level of question
Tags of this sort are known in SE parlance as "meta tags", i.e., tags which don't actually describe what the question is about, and instead describe some other ("meta") aspect of ...
- 131k
2
votes
Tags for calibrating answers to the level of question
I agree that answers should be calibrated to the level of the question, but I have to say I think a tag for this would be useless: if someone doesn't do this calibration already I doubt a tag would ...
- 45.1k
2
votes
Tags for calibrating answers to the level of question
Yes, one should consider the "difficulty level" the OP can handle. But at the same time, SE posts don't exist in a vacuum. Posts are open for all to look at and learn from. So perhaps higher ...
- 55.8k
1
vote
Tags for calibrating answers to the level of question
Status-declined by mother meta. If you disagree, I recommend taking it up with them. However, I personally agree with their conclusion.
- 24.4k
1
vote
What are the goals of this site?
What are the goals of this site?
This site is not volitional and thus does not have goals. While some of those that participate here may not have goals, most do.
What is it we want this site to ...
- 59.3k
1
vote
What can be done to improve Physics.SE as an active forum for physics researchers and student's?
I would like to elaborate on the forceful moderation, as this is my main problem with this site, and what drove me away from it.
Specifically:
Too many times I have seen an honest, well formulated ...
- 5,159
1
vote
What can be done to improve Physics.SE as an active forum for physics researchers and student's?
I’m willing to tolerate some number of “non-research-grade” and generally lower level questions because I make excellent use of answers to less specialized questions on other SE sites. I’m not a ...
- 45.1k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible